Abstract
Objectives
South Africa has high rates of violence. The country has benefitted enormously from the use of injury surveillance data from the health sector, but there is a need to explore other avenues of routine data to advance violence prevention. We demonstrate the value of using routinely collected police data for enhancing our understanding of robbery as an important situational context for violence in South Africa.
Methods
We analysed 1,841,253 cases reported to the police between 2003 and 2014 to describe the distribution and predictors of robbery violence in South Africa.
Results
Robbery is prevalent in South Africa, but the use of violence beyond the threat of force is rare. After adjusting for confounding factors, the probability of co-occurring violence increases when robbery occurs at night, on weekends, involves cash and where the victims are black, young and female.
Conclusions
Using routinely collected police data is valuable for investigating the situational dimensions of violence, thereby enhancing our understanding of contexts that shape violence and its injury outcomes. Such an approach can advance contextually sensitive violence prevention strategies.
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Notes
Race is categorized here according to apartheid population group classifications, which include the terms black, coloured, Indian and white. While the authors recognise that such terms are social categories that served a socio-historical political purpose, they continue to be used in vital statistics and police reporting in South Africa. We have therefore retained the category and its associated terms for our analysis.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the funding received from the Jacobs Foundation and International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS) for this study. The support of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors and are not necessarily to be attributed to the CoE in Human Development. Thanks are also due to Colonel JC van Zyl and Colonel P Klopper for facilitating access to the CAS data used in our analysis.
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This article is part of the special issue “Violence, Justice, and Health: Implications for a Multisectoral Collaboration”.
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Bowman, B., Kramer, S., Salau, S. et al. Linking criminal contexts to injury outcomes: findings and lessons from a national study of robbery in South Africa. Int J Public Health 63, 977–985 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-018-1129-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-018-1129-z