Understanding Crime Through Routine Activities Theory

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III. Summarization of Routine Activities Theory
A. Definition of routine activities approach.
According to Cohen and Felson (1979), routine activities approach relies on three main conditions to rationalize crime. These conditions need to coincide in the same space and time in order for a crime to occur: a motivated offender, suitable target and the absence of capable guardians to deter crime. The authors utilized human ecological theory to examine social structure, and how such coincidence takes place and cause crime in daily life. They believe that people lifestyles increase the opportunity for crime especially when they leave their homes (Cohen & Felson, 1979).
Children’s lifestyles could be an important factor in child sexual abuse cybercrimes
They relied on publications in main journals from 1995 to 2005 to answer a couple of questions related to the validity of routine activities theory. Recall that routine activities theory states that for a crime to occur, a couple of factors have to coincide in time and space: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardian. Not allowing these factors to coincide in time and space, subsequently, leads us to less crime rates. (Spano & Freilich, 2009) concluded that capable guardian have a negative relationship with crime rates and all the other factors have a positive relationship. The results are consistent with the theory factors that affect crime rates. For example, they found that a capable guardian is anticipated to be over 5 times more a defensive factor, target suitability is 3.33 times to be threat factors, motivated offenders are 3.12 times to be threat factors, and lifestyles in general are 7.4 times to be threat factors. However, studies that support the theory focused on juvenile or college age samples (Spano & Freilich,
Researchers can utilize routine activities theory as a general theory of crime to study child sexual abuse crimes. As long as routine activities theory has both macro and micro level scope, then we can utilize it to explain crimes committed by strangers and relatives in a similar fashion. Commonly, researchers utilize theories such as cycle of violence, economic/social structure model, and sociocultural explanation, ecological model, and exchange theory of child abuse when examining child sexual abuse crimes and they are now trying to apply other criminological theories (Andrews,

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