The 2012 Stockholm Prize in Criminology has been awarded to Professor Jan van Dijk of
the University of Tilburg, The Netherlands, for his sustained leadership of the International
Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) since 1989. Professor van Dijk will receive the prize at a
ceremony in Stockholm on June 12, 2012.
Clearing The Fog of Crime
The International Jury’s chair compared the work of the 2012 Stockholm Prize winner to
clearing away a “fog” of confusion about whether crime is becoming more or less frequent or
serious. Prompted by human reactions to a wide range of information about crime, societies
are easily misled about the true dimensions and trends of the problems they face. By providing
more reliable benchmarks of crime both within and across countries, Sherman said, Professor
van Dijk and his numerous colleagues offer a much clearer view of the truth.
Since 1989, the ICVS has interviewed over 300,000 people in the course of five waves of the
survey in a total of 78 countries, with separate findings for 33 major cities. It is the largest ever
multi-national effort to apply the science of criminology to measuring and comparing rates and
trends in the harm of crime, how it affects victims, and how crime victims perceive the
governmental responses to their crimes. As in global data on diseases, economies, climate and
other universal concerns, the ICVS has provided a systematic resource for addressing a wide
range of major questions.
Among the many major conclusions from the ICVS are the following:

· Levels of crimes recorded by the police cannot be reliably across countries because of differential rates at which crime victims report crimes to the police.
· Crime victims in many countries show substantially less preference for prison to punish crimes than their countries employ.
· Rising levels of personal security measures correspond to a general drop in crime across western nations since 1993, but changes in the use of imprisonment do not.
· Crime victims in Western nations have recently become less satisfied with police responses to crimes, despite clear evidence that these responses have changed.
· Perceptions of the risk of crimes in many countries vastly exceed the actual riskof crimes, while in some countries people underestimate risks.

The Western Drop In Crime
The ICVS has provided the most comprehensive evidence yet of the recent drop in crime across
European countries as well as in the US, Canada, Australia and many other developed
countries. The data are from surveys amongst the general public and therefore not influenced
by political or ideological agendas of governments of individual
countries. Standardisation of questionnaires used and other aspects of data collection provide
more reliable comparisons than separate surveys...