Outline and assess the importance of victim surveys for sociological understanding of crime and deviance.

There are many problems associated with the police recording of crime statistics, the main problem being that many crimes go unreported. As an alternative it was suggested that a cross section of the population should be asked about the crimes that have been commited against them. It was argued that more people would be likley to report crimes to an anonymous survey than to the police. There are several reasons why so many crimes go …

…able to move away from strict definitions of crime, and were able to include any behaviour or activities that disrupted people's lives, such as racial abuse, sexual harassment and disputes between neighbours. Victim surveys are of continual importance to sociological research as the help to uncover the 'dark figure,' that is the vast number of unreported andunrecorded crimes. Such surveys give an understanding of the nature and extent of crime in the contemporary UK.