According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, more than one million violent crimes are committed in the United States every year. While data on the attacks, the victims, and the larger community abounds, rarely have researchers explored how incidents of crime impact the mental health of nearby residents.
A new study from Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society Panka Bencsik examined how local violence impacts mental health and stress. In collaboration with Richard Dickens and George MacKerron from the University of Sussex, the study, Violence in the vicinity: the mental health impacts of nearby crime, found that a person is immediately impacted when a violent crime against another person occurs near their home.
Residents experienced increased stress levels for an average of one week following the crime, with levels being most heightened while they were home, and with women and urban residents being the most affected. Through these findings, researchers can better understand the ripple effects violent crime has on a community, such as causing lower performance at work or school.
“Diagnosed mental health disorders, as well as worse mental health due to day-to-day stressors, are wide spread and lead to substantial human and economic costs,” Bencsik said. “A number of studies show that violent crime in a neighborhood can lead to a range of adverse outcomes in school and at work, such as lower test scores for students. Many of these studies note that they believe that these lower student and employee outcomes are due to the stress people experience after violent crime happens in their neighborhood; however, they can’t test this hypothesis. This paper fills an important evidence gap, directly showing that an incident of violent crime leads to significant increases in local residents’ stress.”
The team analyzed data on criminal incidents paired with granular, daily panel data on individuals’ stress levels from one of England’s largest police force areas, the Thames Valley region, from 2010–2017. Over the course of the study, nearly 50,000 responses were collected from residents who were alerted via a smartphone app at a random time each day to share how they were feeling, what they were doing, and whom they were with at that moment. Residents completed these surveys both when they were home and when they were elsewhere. Researchers then compared that data, finding an increase in stress levels that was particularly pronounced when individuals were at home after a violent crime occurred in their home neighborhood. This data collection method is called the “experience sampling method” and is considered the gold standard in data collection on self-reported wellbeing.
“Having multiple responses from the same individuals over time enables us to control for ongoing differences between people—for example, somebody consistently experiencing very little anxiety or living a very stressful life,” Bencsik said. “We can zoom in on how local violence impacts a person and see if a violent event changes their stress level.”
This study is an important step in quantifying violent crime’s overall costs by examining its negative impact on mental health. Looking ahead, Bencsik said communities will benefit from a more holistic understanding of the full impact of violent crime, which then can inform the kinds of policies and funding that can go toward decreasing the number of instances.
“Prior research has looked only at aggregate settings, like how annual crime rates impact cities overall. This study zeros in on the local level, showing how a violent crime incident impacts the mental health of people living in the immediate neighborhood,” Bencsik said. “We can see who is most impacted by nearby crime and, for example, show that the mental health of urban residents is much more impacted by incidents of violent crime than that of rural residents. For policymakers seeking to promote mental health or reduce violent crime, this paper shows how even those who might not themselves be victims of violent crimes still suffer from crimes occurring close to home.”