ABSTRACT
Introduction Herman Mannheim, one of the founders of British academic criminology, was unequivocal on the subject. There can be no immutable standards for ‘natural law’ and crime is a relative concept:
Writing in defence of the methodology adopted in the International Crime Victimisation Survey (ICVS), Jan van Dijk argued that ‘the almost perfect correlations between the ranking of crime types by victims from six regions [of the world] indicates a high degree of consensus about the import of conventional crimes against individuals across the world’ (1999, pp 28-29).
