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Dark Figure Of Crime Analysis

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Canada’s criminal justice system (CJS) is not perfect; there are flaws, imperfections. Imperfections such as the dark figure of crime, as well as the criminal justice funnel, play a key role within the CJS that can determine how the public perceives our justice system. Griffiths (2015) defines the dark figure of crime to simply be the “difference between how much crime occurs and how much crime is reported to or discovered by the police.” (p. 45) This unreported amount of crime is the starting point of the criminal justice funnel where the numerical figure for each division decreases drastically. As with all crime in Canada, police are unable to resolve the matter unless it is detected by the officer themselves, or if it is reported by the …show more content…

Before we can answer this question, we must further understand how the dark figure of crime affects the criminal justice funnel. The process of the funnel, in regard to corrections and conditional release for example, begins with the dark figure, the number of unreported crimes. It then continues to decrease as the funnel progresses down to the total number of reported offences, then to the cases with guilty findings, sentenced admission to provincial/territorial custody, and finally to the lowest count regarding warrants of committal admissions to federal jurisdiction. As you advance down the funnel, the counts drop drastically, decreasing almost 450% from the first known stage (incidents reported to the police) to the last stage (federal jurisdictions) (Griffiths, 2015, p. 27). This is mainly due to the fact that victims do not report crimes that are committed against them, resulting in the spike in the dark figure of crime which displays approximately 60% of crime remains unreported as stated in the article by Fohring (2014). It is further proved that victims are “highly motivated to avoid be labelled as victims.” (p. 8) Individuals, for the most part, do not want to walk around the streets and have people treat them differently, like they are a different person, simply because they are a victim. Additionally, they do not want to be subject to revictimization …show more content…

Victims are simply afraid to come forward and share the information about the crimes committed against them. There are many reasons why domestic violence or spousal abuse victims do not come forward and tell their story right away. Bostick (2017) outlines some of the main reasons such as “A lot of victims prefer to create an alternate reality, one in which the abuse didn’t happen” or that the “Victims find it easier to pretend to be normal and live a lie than face the horror of sexual abuse and trauma” as well as the simple fact that “Naming an act of sexual violence makes it real” (para. 4). All of these reasons can have a significant impact on the CJS and the dark figure of crime because people can argue that sexual assault is one of the most personal attacks on an individual. Teitel (2014) later expands and explains that in the questioning process, there are no easy question, there are no questions the victim would want to answer, and this may be another reason why victims do not come forward (para. 3). In regard to the criminal justice funnel, the self-reported incidents down to actual convictions for spousal assaults decreased by almost 83 percent (Griffiths, 2015, p. 27). The CJS must implement matters to make it more approachable for victims of such sexual assault, spousal assault, and

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