The Cost of Crime: The HAVEN Conceptual Framework for Measuring Victim Harms from Violence

Valid and reliable measures of the harms to victims of crime are critical inputs to policy choices. Recent advances in cost-benefit methodology allow these measures to be directly estimated in causal models, but these models require individual- or event-level data. This article presents a new conceptual framework, known as HAVEN (Harms After Victimization: Experiences and Needs), for individual victim harm measurement. Guided by the conceptual framework, these models solve three critical problems in victim harm measurement: they motivate data linkage across medical and legal systems (and other) data; they integrate the log-normal distribution of harms into the framework and thereby include catastrophic costs as valid measures rather than exclude as outliers; and they prioritize integrated systems data (i.e. medical-legal) rather than single system measures of victimization harm. The conceptual framework also creates a dynamic framework to expand individual- and event-level harm measurement in future studies.