On the back of recently-published crime statistics from the South African Police Service, Stats SA has published its annual Victims of Crime (VOC) survey, which shows that a shocking number of crimes go unreported in the country.
The VOC survey looks at private households from all nine provinces in South Africa, and provides information about the dynamics of crime from the perspective of these households and victims of crime.
As with previous reports – and in line with the SAPS’ statistics – the most common crime experienced by South Africans is housebreaking and home robbery.
Housebreakings or burglaries are crimes that do not involve contact between the perpetrator and victim, while house robberies do.
With housebreakings, the VOC survey data showed that 969,567 households experienced incidents in the past 12 months, with 1.35 million incidences spread among them.
However, the SAPS’ statistics for reported cases of housebreakings shows that only 220,865 cases were logged in the same period.
This means that the prevalence of housebreaking in South Africa could be as much as six times greater than the official police stats show, with the vast majority of cases (84%) going unreported.
According to the VOC report, 52% of households did not report any of the experienced incidences of housebreaking to the police, 4% reported some incidents, and only 44% reported all of them.
Over the last five years, 13% of all households – about 2.2 million – have experienced housebreaking in the country, the data showed.
The same levels of under-reporting is true for cases of house robberies, the VOC data showed.
Nearly 184,000 households experienced just over 264,000 incidents of house robberies over the past 12 months – but the SAPS has only 22,431 cases reported in its data. Again, the prevalence of the crime could be as much as 12 times greater than is shown in police stats, with over 90% of the crimes left unreported.
Across all the crime categories covered in the VOC, the levels of households not reporting crimes to the police range between 13.7% (theft of motor vehicles) and 65% (street robbery).