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INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents national statistics on incidents of victimisation for a selected range of offences that came to the attention of state and territory police and were recorded by them in the period 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009. The statistics provide information about the characteristics of the victim and the nature of the criminal incidents.

Victim counts can be influenced by a number of factors including a victim's preparedness to report an incident to police, and police initiatives targeted at specific offences. There may be a higher propensity for victims of sexual assault offences to not report the offence. Movements between years can be influenced by these factors. Low prevalence offences such as murder, robbery, blackmail/extortion, and kidnapping/abduction are subject to volatile movements due to small counts. For more information about how victims are counted for this collection refer to paragraphs 34-41 of the Explanatory Notes.

Depending on the type of offence, a victim in the Recorded Crime - Victims collection can be a person, a premises, an organisation or a motor vehicle. A person reporting a crime with multiple offences in the same incident may either be counted multiple times, or may be counted only once, depending on the types of offences committed during the incident. For example, a victim who was robbed and abducted in the same incident would be counted separately as a victim under the offences of robbery and kidnapping/abduction. Conversely, a victim of multiple assaults in the same incident would be counted only once as the offences committed fall within the same offence group. For these reasons, it is not meaningful to aggregate the number of victims across each offence type and produce a 'total number of victims'; it is only meaningful to look at victim counts within each offence category.

For further information about the scope and counting methodology of this collection refer to paragraphs 3-10 and 34-41 of the Explanatory Notes.