Oct 31, 2022
In this episode of Statistically Speaking Miles is helped with his enquiries by Meghan Elkin and Billy Gazard from the Office for National Statistics, as he investigates how we use data to get valuable insights into the impact of crime on modern society.
Along the way he debunks common misconceptions; learns how the nature of crime continues to evolve; and uncovers the work being done behind-the-scenes to make crime data more inclusive.
TRANSCRIPT
MILES FLETCHER
Hello, and welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking’ the Office for National Statistics podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode, we're going to be investigating crime.
What is the statistical evidence that despite the impression you might have got from the media, overall crime in England and Wales has actually been falling? Or is it the case that the nature of crime has simply changed and we're more likely these days to be targeted online than in the streets, and what in any case is the value of understanding the overall level of crime when that term captures such a wide and varied range of social ills and harms?
Helping us with our enquiries today are Meghan Elkin, head of the ONS centre for crime and justice, and Billy Gazard head of acquisitive crime and stakeholder engagement.
Meghan, so much to talk about in the
many and varied crime figures that ONS produces, but let's focus
first on where those numbers come from. In this case, there are two
major data sets and the first and arguably the most significant of
those, statistically at least, is a very large survey and it's not
information gathered from the police or government. It's
information that comes directly from people and their experience of
crime. Tell us all about that.
MEGHAN ELKIN
That's correct. So the best source we
have for measuring crime is the crime survey for England and Wales
and this is a massive undertaking. We interview around 34,000
people aged 16 and over each year, and over 2000 children, and we
really appreciate everyone who takes the time to respond to our
survey as it helps us to produce these important figures. As you
said, crime covers a wide range of offences and there's no perfect
source, but the crime survey has had an established methodology
over a long period of time, which really helps us to get a good
idea of the trends and changes in society that people are
experiencing.
MF
Give us a sense of the scale of this
operation. Is it one of the biggest surveys the ONS
runs?
ME
It is, I would say that we are
consistently speaking to 34,000 people each year and what's
probably different to most surveys is that we have children as part
of the response as well. So when we go to a household, we'll
interview an adult, so someone aged 16 and over, to ask about their
experiences. If there are children aged 10 to 15 in their
household. We'll also ask if one of them would be able to complete
our children's survey so that we get a picture of the crime that
they're experiencing as well.
MF
And what is the particular value of
speaking people to people face to face in their homes like
that?
ME
I mean, the real value of the crime
survey for measuring the trends is that it doesn't matter if people
have reported what they've experienced to the police or not, so
unlike police recorded crime, it doesn't have that impact. And so
we can ask people about their experiences in the last 12 months.
We'll also ask them questions about their attitudes towards crime
related issues such as the police and amount of security that they
have, and for the most sensitive questions rather than being asked
by the interviewer directly, we'll give someone a tablet so that
they can complete those questions privately themselves to ensure
that confidentiality and confidence in telling us such sensitive
information.
MF
That’s taken the survey into some quite
new areas, hasn't it in recent years, would you like to talk about
some of those developments? You talk about actually, and this is
highly unusual, of course a very sensitive area, it's about the
ability to actually speak to children as well. Tell us to what end
that work has been directed...
ME
So for children in particular,
we've been working closely with a number of stakeholders to
understand what's most useful for us to ask children. So we do
collect their general experiences of crime in the last 12 months,
but we also ask them about their experiences online and that's
provided some really useful data about children's lived experiences
about being bullied and whether that's happening at school or
online, but also the behaviours and activities that sometimes could
be quite risky that they're taking part in online. And that's given
some new information into that sector that we had just not
understood before, and has been really useful in shaping policy and
understanding how children can be better protected
online.
MF
So this is quite an intensive encounter
with the ONS data gatherer as they're sitting down for about 40 to
45 minutes or so. But how are the people selected? And how do you
go about ensuring that they're a good representative sample and
that we're not missing out important sections of the population,
which, on a subject like this, of course, it's very important to
get a really accurate picture of how people are experiencing crime
at that grassroots level.
ME
So we use a postcode address file,
basically a list of addresses to sample from, so households are
chosen at random to ensure that we've got a representative sample
for England and Wales. That's why it's really important and we
really appreciate people responding to the survey because that's
how we ensure good quality data, by getting that good, rounded
sample.
MF
So there's a lot of rich data coming out
of the crime survey, but by its nature, it doesn't cover some of
the more serious offences does it?
ME
No that's true, particularly the higher
harm but lower volume crimes, for example knife crime, those don't
appear in the survey very often. And so we look to other data
sources for those. It also excludes crimes that are often termed
“victimless”, such as possession of drugs, which again, we then
measure through different sources.
MF
And that is where the other major data
source starts to become more relevant. We're looking at very
serious offences particularly, including murder and rape. Those
offences are covered by the police and their recording of crime.
Tell us about the value of that data, and how that contributes to
the wider understanding of crime.
ME
So the police record all the crimes that
are reported to them and those are fed into us via the Home Office
as a record of police recorded crime. And it has lots of advantages
as a data source in that for some crime types, it is a good
measure. And unlike the crime survey for those crime types, it can
be very good at looking at short term trends. So particularly
through the pandemic it was helpful for some of those crime types
where we know that it's a better measure. But we also know that
there are a lot of crimes that people don't report to the police
and that's where that source of data struggles the most,
particularly for really hidden crimes. Rape would be one of those
crimes, where relatively few people do report that to the police so
it doesn't appear in the numbers as much. But the police
figures are subject to changes in recording practices. So when new
offences are introduced that obviously changes how the count
is put together, but also it’s impacted by police activity and how
they record and that also will change the numbers. When you see
increases in police recorded crime, for example, it doesn't
necessarily mean that crime has gone up. And that's part of our
work at ONS to unpick and understand what's going on there.
But it does have benefits as you say, for some of the higher harm
but lower volume crimes that we see, homicide it records very well,
and for knife crime it's our best measure. So there's definitely a
place for it as a data source still.
MF
So two major data sources contributing
to this bigger picture. And what has that bigger picture been
showing us these last few years?
ME
Well when we look across trends in
general, actually, over time, crime has been decreasing since the
mid 90s, and has been more flat in recent years. So the crime
survey estimated around 20 million offences in 1995. And we've seen
that decreasing over time and our latest data shows that it's
around 5 million offences. And that's when you're using a
comparable estimate. So the overall picture is very much if that
crime sits much lower than it used to in the mid 90s. And
that's not just a pattern that we've seen in England and Wales.
It's a pattern that's reflected across other countries, across
Europe and America. And it's something that lots of people have
tried to understand what's really driven that long term change.
More recently we have seen some decreases, some of them very much
linked to the pandemic. But now as we look and compare before
the pandemic to our most recent data, we have still seen some
decreases. I think it's always important to point out that while
total crime is a useful measure and reflection, it's only when you
really start digging into the individual crime types that you can
start seeing some trends that just get averaged out when you look
at the total.
MF
Yes, you need to understand what kind of
offences we're talking about. And if we talk about that long term
picture, isn't it the case that we saw, coming out of the 1980s
into the 1990s, turn of the century, violent crime decreasing,
damage to property and so forth and theft from cars. Was that the
broad trend that we saw?
ME
Yeah, so we've seen decreases in that
time period across a number of crime types. One of the most popular
explanations of the overall pattern there is the “security
hypothesis”, which is very much built on the widespread
improvements we've seen in security devices which have prevented
crimes from happening and caused that decrease. So
you mentioned there of vehicles, vehicle theft has decreased,
most likely due to some things like improvements in central
deadlocking systems and electric immobilisers, those security
measures that have improved so much. But we have also seen
decreases in violence across that time as well.
MF
Threat to property is one thing of
course, but yes, personal safety and and our well-being on the
streets, is of course a major factor as well. Talk us through the
trends on that because if you rely entirely on the news media for
your understanding of violent crime, you probably think that
things are in a pretty desperate situation.
ME
So when we look back over that long term
picture again, the estimate that we have from the crime survey for
violence shows that there were around 4.5 million offences in 1995
And that compares to 1.2 million in the most recent data.
Obviously, we've talked about the limitations to the crime survey
data for understanding violence, but the more serious crimes within
this type that we don't see in the crime survey are at much lower
levels. They are lower volume, thankfully, and so we have seen some
patterns there of variation during the pandemic.
MF
Another important development these last
few years, of course, has been getting a much better understanding
of the nature and extent of child abuse, an area of huge
sensitivity and massive public concern. Can you talk a little about
the work that's been going on in that area?
ME
So we've been conducting a feasibility
study over the last few years to look at whether a measure of
prevalence of child abuse could be estimated. A few years ago
we put together a compendium of statistics on child abuse to help
people understand the levels of child abuse and the nature of child
abuse being experienced in our society. But the major gap in
that evidence base is a prevalence level for what's being
experienced now by children. We do in the crime survey for England
and Wales ask people about the experiences they had as children. So
we asked that of adults and that gives us some insight but it's
still not helping policymakers understand what's actually happening
in society today. So we've been conducting lots of research to
understand the challenges, and how we might be able to overcome
those of asking children such sensitive questions. And that work
has been going really well, we're now at the stage of looking at
what questions could actually be asked and the safeguarding
that would need to wrap around that survey to look after the
children completing it. So we're working very closely with DFE and
Ofsted and schools to understand how that might best work going
forward. So that's the next stage of that project.
MF
What has that experience and that
engagement brought to this highly sensitive topic?
ME
We work very closely with the NSPCC, who
have been extremely supportive of the project and how it's
developing and helping us understand the safeguarding procedures
that we might be able to use with a survey, and the support that we
can give children and the different ways of doing that. There's a
careful balance of helping children feel they are able to open up
and tell us about experiences while also then safeguarding them and
managing that challenge of confidentiality. And the NSPCC and
others like them, obviously have great experience of being in this
place and supporting children that we can then take on board to
make sure that we do the survey in the best way
possible.
MF
That's going to remain an important
piece of work for the future. If there's one really important use
of all this data, it is to understand the risks that any of us face
of becoming the victim of crime at any given time. Billy, what
are the numbers saying about that?
BILLY GAZARD
So I think it's quite a complicated
picture. When we're talking about all the crime that the crime
survey measures, for example, just under one in five people would
have experienced a crime in the last 12 months according to the
latest data, but obviously that varies across different crime
types. So for example, fraud, about one in 12 people would have
experienced fraud in the last 12 months, whereas offences such as
violence, only about 2% of the population would have experienced a
violent offence in the last 12 months.
MF
That overall is kind of reassuring,
I guess, but nevertheless, those are significant sections of the
population.
BG
Yes, I agree. That still translates into
a lot of people experiencing that crime. So obviously, it's really
important that we continue to monitor levels of violence moving
forward to see how that changes over time.
MF
And if you break it down by geography, I
guess of course, in some areas, those risks, particularly of
violence and crimes against property are going to be much
higher?
BG
This is looking at the national picture,
but there will be variations at geographical levels, as well as by
lots of different characteristics. For example, we know that
younger people are at more risk of experiencing violence than older
sections of the population.
MF
So that's the overall picture, but
Meghan the risks might be rather different if you happen to be
female.
MEGHAN ELKIN
There are some crime types that
disproportionately affect women and girls compared to men and boys.
Say for example, we estimate 1.6 million women aged 16 to 74
suffered domestic abuse in the last year and that one in three
women over the age of 16 were subjected to at least one form of
harassment in the last year. So there again, there is that
variation in crime types that people are experiencing. And when we
look at measures around domestic abuse, again, the crime
survey for England and Wales is our most trusted measure. And as I
reflected earlier, those are the crime types where we actually give
respondents a tablet so that they can complete those questions
confidentially. And actually, that posed us a particular challenge
during the pandemic where our face-to-face interviewing had to stop
and we moved to telephone interviews, and we managed to make that
switch very quickly to be able to keep getting the crime estimates
that were needed to understand society. But we did think there was
a risk of asking people on the telephone those really sensitive
questions about experiences of domestic abuse and sexual assault,
but the concerns around confidentiality and respondent safeguarding
were just too great for us to be able to ask those questions. So
for a period of time, we weren't collecting that information when
the survey returned to the field, though, we went back as early as
we could so that we could start collecting those important topics
again. And we now have the first data from those for domestic abuse
since before the pandemic started. Now that we've started to get
the face-to-face survey back into publication, some caution needs
to be taken for interpreting those results. Because of how the
surveys come back there are some challenges to quality and so
again, we need to be a bit cautious in interpreting them, but it's
so important that we've got those figures back. And actually what
we see from the crime survey is that there's been no change in the
prevalence of domestic abuse in the most recent data when compared
to before the pandemic. But this is an opportunity to show how we
use multiple data sources to really understand what might be going
on in society and what people are experiencing. Because while the
crime survey has now shown no change in the prevalence of
domestic abuse, we have seen increases throughout that time in
police recorded crime data. And we've also seen increases in data
that we collect from charities. We work closely with a range of
charities in the domestic abuse space to understand the changes
that are happening to their services and the demand they're seeing,
but also to help us understand the nature of abuse. So during
lockdowns for example, we saw a 22% increase in calls to the
National Domestic Abuse helpline for the year ending March 21, so
there was definitely that increase in demand. But now combining
that with the crime survey evidence that we haven't seen an
increase in prevalence, actually that helps us understand that
maybe that increase in demand from charities primarily came from a
lack of other coping mechanisms and people reaching out in
different ways to get the support they needed during that difficult
time.
MF
And that would be seem to be a very
valuable example of using other data sources than police recorded
crime to get an accurate picture of what's going on, because of the
simple reluctance that so many people have in reporting these
experiences when they happen to them.
ME
Yes, that's true. I mean, the evidence
we have is that one in five victims of partner abuse in the last
year would have told the police, and that just shows how hidden
these crime types are. And that's true when you look into sexual
assault as well, where one in six tell us that they would have told
the police about what happened to them. And that's an area where we
haven't used charity data before to help us understand sexual
assault, but it's something we're working on at the moment to be
included in next year's publication.
MF
Are there other areas of offending where
we could possibly get a better picture than we currently have at
the moment?
ME
So harassment is also an area that in
initial work on violence against women and girls, we found that
actually there wasn't as much data as we thought there might be to
help understand that situation. So we used some questions on the
opinion survey last year to help us understand levels of harassment
at a very basic level, for lack of a better description. But
we've now introduced new questions on the crime survey as well to
help us understand that topic. But again, I think that's going to
be one where when that data becomes available to us to analyse
we'll be able to start looking at other groups and organisations
we'd like to work with to understand better that situation and
support our efforts to make our statistics more inclusive. Working
with stakeholders really helps us to look for these new data
sources and new insights, to really understand the scale and nature
of crime that people are experiencing.
MF
So Billy, just as the recording of crime
evolves over time, so does what we consider to be a criminal
offence. Tell us about the offences of the past, and what acts were
regarded as criminal in their day and are no
longer.
BILLY GAZARD
Yes I think it's important to remember
that our laws are always changing to reflect the concerns of our
society as it evolves. Something that was criminal hundreds of
years ago might sound pretty absurd today. So for example, playing
football used to be an offence in mediaeval times, there was
punching the ball as well as kicking the ball and deaths were not
uncommon.
MF
That's not a well-known fact!
BG
It actually became an offence in 1388
and wasn’t repealed until 1845.
MF
And were
any people prosecuted? I think we know we know what the
sentence was...
BG
The sentence for breaking this law was
actually six days in prison. There are no stats on how many people
were punished for breaking this law or how many people were put in
prison for that. Another offence it seems absurd today, but we do
have some stats on how many people actually were prosecuted for
this is witchcraft. This actually became an offence in 1542 and it
wasn't repealed until 1736 and during this time 500 witches were
put on trial and over 100 of those were executed.
MF
Grisly stuff! History has moved on, and
of course these days we're dealing with some very 21st century
phenomenon, and that of course is the growth of online crime,
cybercrime and and phishing scams. Tell us about the emergence of
that type of offending. What has happened over the last few years
and what is the position now?
BG
So what we've seen with fraud and
computer misuse offences is very different to what we've seen with
other types of offences. But unfortunately, we've only been
starting to measure fraud and computer misuse offences on the crime
survey since 2017. So we don't have the same long standing time
series that we have for the other crime types, and this is
obviously because a lot of online crime, this is a fairly new
phenomenon, so we've taken our time to really develop those
questions and now they are on the survey. What we have seen over
the last five years since we started recording these offences is
that those offences have stayed fairly flat over that time period.
Over the pandemic however, we did see an increase in fraud and
computer misuse offences during that period and we think that's
probably to do with people spending more time at home and spending
more time online. And what we did see in terms of fraud, we saw
that the proportion of fraud incidents that were cyber related
increased up to almost two thirds, from about 50% before the
pandemic. So it suggests that actually, a lot of the rise in fraud
offences that we did see were because of a rise in cyber related
fraud rather than offline fraud.
MF
One popular conception is that it's
mainly elderly people who are the targets of this online crime, but
that's not actually the case is it?
BG
No. And definitely, when we look at our
data, that's definitely not something that we're finding. Actually
what we find is that adults aged 75 years or older are actually
less likely to be victims of fraud. It's those in working age
groups, adults aged 25 to 44 for example, who are more risk of
receiving phishing messages, those employed and those living
in less deprived areas are much more likely to receive those
messages. And that might be to do with fraudsters targeting those
groups because they know that they have more disposable money. So
definitely older people are at less risk than the working
population.
MF
So there is something in this argument
perhaps that crime generally has moved
online?
BG
I think there’s definitely an argument
that a lot more crime is happening online, and we're definitely
seeing that with fraud incidents. We have less data on other crime
types, though obviously the internet and the act of being online
can be used across many crime types. For example, harassment,
stalking, these are other offenses that people can use online
tools to commit. And that's something that we're always trying to
improve on the crime survey, to introduce those types of questions
so that we can get a better understanding of how online tools are
being used to commit crimes.
MF
So online crime is a relatively recent
development, but crime and offending of course, continues to
develop unfortunately and go in different directions. Tell us about
other developments that the ONS has got in hand. To try and either
capture new types of offending or perhaps just get a better insight
on more established patterns of crime and harm.
BG
In the Crime Survey for England and
Wales (CSEW), we ask people living in private households lots of
questions about their experiences with crime so we can produce an
estimation of how much crime that group of people is experiencing.
That's about 98% of the population of England and Wales. But what
the survey doesn't cover is people who do not live in private
households. This covers, for example, people living in residential
care settings, or homeless people, students living in student
halls. So although this is only about 2% of the population, these
groups have very different experiences of crime. And it's really
important that we also try and capture their experiences so that we
can provide information for policymakers to take action on the
crime that those groups are experiencing. One of the things that
we're trying to do is produce a publication looking at crimes
experienced by non-household populations as well. So we're
currently doing some work investigating what other data sources are
available that we can use to shine the light on it at ONS and
share that information alongside what we do with household
populations. So we're going to be going out talking to various
stakeholders, talking to different data holders to see how can we
work together to bring a picture of all the data that we have and
better understand what the risks are for these groups in terms of
experiencing crime and how can we bring all of that
together.
MF
So as crime continues to evolve you can
count on one thing, the ONS will continue to measure it, and
explore it, and hopefully contribute to solving
it.
Thanks very much to Meghan Elkin and Billy Gazard. I'm Miles Fletcher, and you've been listening to ‘Statistically Speaking’. You can subscribe to new episodes of the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts and all other major podcast platforms.
Our producers at the ONS are Steve Milne and Alisha Arthur.
Until next time,
goodbye.