Harms and Consequences of Victimization

• Published date: 01 February 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10439862241290360
• Author: Lynn Langton,Michael Planty
• Date: 01 February 2025

https://doi.org/10.1177/10439862241290360

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2025, Vol. 41(1) 115 –140

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10439862241290360

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Article

Harms and Consequences

of Victimization

Lynn Langton1 and Michael Planty1

Abstract

To meaningfully measure crime and track increases and decreases in public safety,

some criminologists have argued for the need to focus on the harms associated

with crime rather than counts of the number of crimes. Although numerous other

countries have established crime harm indexes, the United States continues to

rely heavily on traditional approaches to enumerating crime and to focus primarily

on crimes reported to police. This article sets out to examine the harms and

consequences of violence as assessed by the National Crime Victimization Survey

(NCVS). We provide a descriptive assessment of the physical and social-emotional

harms associated with experiencing a violent victimization and use this incident-

level information to create an index that moves from simple enumeration to a fuller

accounting of harm. We compare harm levels and trends over time to crime counts

and by various crime and victim types. We examine how these harms are associated

with help-seeking behavior, including reporting to the police and victim assistance.

Our aim is to demonstrate how incident-based information about harms can provide

additional information about the magnitude of crime and victim help-seeking behavior.

Keywords

harm index, crime enumeration, violent victimization, victim services

Introduction

The measurement of crime is a critically important social indicator. Tracking the

amount of crime that occurs is important for the allocation of resources for public

safety and support for victims. It also creates accountability for public officials and

other key stakeholders to ensure that those resources have their intended effects. The

United States has two national systems that provide a picture of the level and

1RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Lynn Langton, RTI International, 701 13th Street NW, Suite 750, Washington, DC 20005, USA.

Email: laustell@rti.org

1290360CCJXXX10.1177/10439862241290360Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeLangton and Planty

research-article2024

116Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 41(1)

distribution of crime—the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the

Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Both sys-

tems track the number of crimes that occur over time, giving each crime equal weight

regardless of the seriousness or the consequences it has for victims.

Yet we know that crimes can vary widely in the impact that they have on victims’

lives. Some crimes have significant direct impacts on the well-being of individuals,

including negative physical, psychological, social, and financial consequences. Others

have impacts that are more indirect, causing increases in fear and safety for communi-

ties that lead to larger social and economic disruption. Enumerating the amount and

type of harms experienced through crime allows for a more robust description of the

crime problem and the implementation of policies and practices that prioritize those

crimes that are the most damaging to victims and to society.

One way to do this is to create a harm index where crimes that have more damaging

consequences for victims are given more weight in the enumeration process (Sherman,

2007, 2013; Sherman et al., 2016). The notion of measuring the harm or severity of

crime dates back more than 50 years (see Rossi et al., 1974; Sellin & Wolfgang, 1964),

with a multitude of approaches used for determining which crimes are more serious,

including public opinion, court records, cost of crime estimates, and sentencing

(Curtis-Ham & Walton, 2018; Sherman et al., 2016). Harm indexes are often consid-

ered to be distinct from severity indexes, which account for more than just direct

harms to victims, factoring in considerations such as offender intentionality, offender

characteristics, and extent of impact (Ashby, 2017; Parton et al., 1991).

One of the most influential harm indexes, the United Kingdom’s Cambridge Crime

Harm Index (CHI), relies on sentencing guidelines, a scoring rubric that is used to

determine an appropriate sentence for offenders convicted of crimes, as the foundation

of the index (Sherman et al., 2016). The CHI builds on the fact that more harmful

offenses are given longer sentences in the guidelines. Using the CHI, crimes are

weighted based on the days of imprisonment associated with the offense. Because the

CHI is based on sentencing guidelines, it is generally agnostic to the characteristics of

the offender, except in the case of status crimes that are defined by differences in the

age of the victim and age of the offender.

Although countries around the world have created similar harm indexes (see, for

example, Andersen & Mueller-Johnson, 2018; House & Neyroud, 2018; Kärrholm

et al., 2020), this effort has not been undertaken in the United States at a national level.

In this article, we attempt to build on the CHI and address the issues of traditional

crime enumeration approaches in the United States by using the NCVS to create a

harm index. The NCVS has several advantages to police data and can extend beyond

traditional sentencing guideline factors, including measures of both reported and unre-

ported crime, extended victim characteristics, harms related to socio-emotional impact,

and repeat victimization. First, we discuss current crime measurement approaches and

why the creation of a harm index is important for addressing the limitations of these

approaches. Next, we provide a descriptive assessment of the harms associated with

experiencing violent victimization. We then use this incident-level information to cre-

ate an index that moves from simple enumeration of the volume of crime toward a