Woodhams Jessica, Keetch Blaine, Shah Prachiben, Brett Matthew, Davies Kari, Flowe Heather, Duran Fazeelat, Galambos Sarah, Gregory Pippa
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham.
National Crime Agency, London, United Kingdom.
Psychol Violence. 2025 Jul;15(4):502-514. doi: 10.1037/vio0000574. Epub 2024 Dec 2.
With COVID-19 came a range of public health measures that impacted people's routine activities. According to routine activity theory, these could affect the rate and nature of crime. This has largely been examined with volume crime (e.g., burglary, robbery) or crimes committed in the home. Stranger sex offenses greatly vary in nature and occur in a range of settings; therefore, these offenses present a novel opportunity to investigate different routine activity theory-based hypotheses. The National Crime Agency routinely collects detailed information about all stranger sex offenses reported to the police in the United Kingdom. With these standardized data ( = 6,422), we studied the relationship between COVID-19 public health measures and the rate and characteristics of stranger sex offending across the entire first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting this with data from the same period pre-COVID-19. Our findings accord with classic criminological theory whereby the incidence and characteristics of U.K. stranger sex offenses reported to police covaried with the population's patterns of mobility and national lockdowns during the first year of COVID-19. This impact on routine activities also manifested in differences in perpetrator and victim behavior and characteristics. Our study supports the applicability of routine activity theory to sex offending and brings new insights regarding the situational prevention of sex offending during major events such as a pandemic. It is also relevant to the urgent need to educate prosecutors who are now making decisions about sex offenses perpetrated during the early years of this pandemic.
随着新冠疫情的出现，一系列公共卫生措施影响了人们的日常活动。根据日常活动理论，这些措施可能会影响犯罪率和犯罪性质。此前，这一理论主要用于研究侵财犯罪（如入室盗窃、抢劫）或在家中实施的犯罪。陌生人性犯罪在性质上差异很大，且发生在多种场景中；因此，这些犯罪为研究基于日常活动理论的不同假设提供了新的契机。英国国家犯罪局定期收集向警方报告的所有陌生人性犯罪的详细信息。利用这些标准化数据（n = 6422），我们研究了新冠疫情期间第一年新冠公共卫生措施与陌生人性犯罪率及特征之间的关系，并将其与新冠疫情前同期的数据进行对比。我们的研究结果符合经典犯罪学理论，即在新冠疫情第一年，向警方报告的英国陌生人性犯罪的发生率和特征与民众的流动模式及全国封锁情况相关。这种对日常活动的影响还体现在犯罪者和受害者的行为及特征差异上。我们的研究支持日常活动理论在性犯罪研究中的适用性，并为在疫情等重大事件期间预防性犯罪提供了新的见解。这对于当下迫切需要教育检察官如何处理疫情初期发生的性犯罪案件也具有重要意义。
