What fear does to you, and the robbery decision

Most people have wondered, at least once, what they would do if someone stepped out of a doorway and demanded their bag. The honest answer is that nobody knows in advance, and part of the reason is that the person who meets that moment isn't quite the person who wondered about it. A sudden threat changes what the body does, what the eyes take in and what memory keeps, before any decision is made. This lesson takes those two things in order: first what fear does to you, as far as the research can say, and then the decision people argue about most, whether to hand property over or to resist.

That responsibility sentence carries more weight here than anywhere else in the course. A person who was robbed, and froze, or handed everything over, or fought, didn't cause what happened to them, and none of those responses was the wrong one. This lesson describes what the evidence says happens on average across thousands of incidents. It never grades what one person did in one moment, and if you've been in that moment, nothing below is a verdict on it.

What a threat does to the body

The fullest single account this course found is a 2015 review in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry by Kozlowska and colleagues, Fear and the Defense Cascade. This course read its abstract. It describes a set of defence responses that it calls innate and automatically activated, and it puts them in an order: "Arousal is the first step ... flight or fight is an active defense response ... freezing is a flight-or-fight response put on hold; tonic immobility and collapsed immobility are responses of last resort to inescapable threat, when active defense responses have failed".¹

So on this account there are two very different kinds of stillness. Freezing comes early, while fight or flight is still possible, and is held back from them. Tonic immobility, a state in which the body is unable to move for a while, is a last resort, when there is no escape from the threat and active defences have failed; the abstract names collapsed immobility beside it without defining it. Lesson 11, "Sexual assault: the freeze, resistance and the law", comes back to tonic immobility, because the research on it was done in that setting.

The idea people most often get wrong is that freezing is a failure: the body giving up, or the person being weak. Roelofs, reviewing the animal and human research in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in 2017, puts it the other way round.

Roelofs adds a caution that belongs beside that sentence whenever it is quoted. Most of the work is on animals, and in humans freezing's "phenomenology and neurobiological underpinnings remain largely unexplored".² The abstract reports that brain imaging suggests similar brain regions may be involved in people, and that being able to shift between freezing and active defence matters for coping with stress. So the fair summary is: freezing is automatic, it has a job, and how it works in people is still being worked out.

Names that are proposals

You may have met longer lists. Bracha, in CNS Spectrums in 2004, argued that freeze, flight, fight, fright, faint gives "a more complete description of the human acute stress response sequence" than the accounts before it.³ That's a proposal about the order and the names, made in an article whose main argument is about fainting at the sight of blood, and this course read only its abstract. Taylor and colleagues, in Psychological Review in 2000, proposed that "behaviorally, females' responses are more marked by a pattern of 'tend-and-befriend'", while fight or flight may describe the physiological response in both sexes.⁴ That's a theory too, and the journal later published a comment on it, with the authors' reply, which this course did not read. "Fawn", often added to fight, flight and freeze, comes from clinical writing about trauma, not from experiments, as the research behind this course found; this course doesn't teach it as a finding.

None of this makes the proposals wrong. Put side by side, the sources this course read support three things well: going still under sudden threat is automatic, not chosen; threat changes what people see, hear and remember; and it makes practised skills less reliable. The last two were measured in police officers. The exact sequence, the names for each stage, and whether women and men differ, are still argued over.

One thing the sources here leave out is how often people freeze in a robbery or a street attack. Nobody this course read has counted it. The one frequency figure the course has is for tonic immobility, from a study of women seen at one clinic after rape, and lesson 11 gives it there, in its own setting, rather than stretching it to every kind of threat.

What happens to the senses and to memory

The best-known figures on this come from police officers, because shootings are investigated in detail and officers can be asked afterwards. Artwohl, a police psychologist, gave a written survey to 157 officers who had been involved in shootings at several agencies, and reported the results in an article first published in the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin in 2002 and updated in 2008.⁵

Those numbers need their caveats, and Artwohl supplies some of them herself. It was a voluntary written survey, not an experiment. The officers she surveyed herself, about two thirds of the total, were asked to fill it in only after a group debriefing, where, as each officer told their version, a fuller picture of what happened came together. She did that on purpose: many officers, she writes, "are not fully aware of their own memory and perceptual distortions until they are confronted with evidence". This course's caution is that officers may also have taken on details they heard there. The same survey found that 21% said they had seen, heard or experienced something that didn't really happen, a figure she calls "not huge" but "certainly not trivial". And after comparing her figures with earlier studies, she wrote that "the exact percentages don't matter": what matters, in her account, is that studies using different methods keep finding that perception and memory are distorted to some degree in these events.⁵

Artwohl writes that the same point about memory applies to other eyewitnesses, but her figures are officers'; carrying their direction to a person at a cash machine is this course's step. The officers were trained, armed and in a situation their job had prepared them for. What carries over, on this course's reading, is the direction rather than the numbers: under sudden threat, expect to see less of your surroundings, to hear less, and to remember the event in pieces.

Lesson 9 made a promise about this. Theo, in the queue in Albany, was told that nobody should expect a perfect description of themselves. This is why. If you once gave an account of something frightening and later found it differed from a recording, or remembered a detail differently a week on, the research describes the same thing happening to trained professionals. It is not lying, and it is no sign that anything else is wrong with you.

What happens to skill and judgement

Two small experiments with police officers, run by researchers in the Netherlands, separate two things that often get lumped together: doing a practised movement, and deciding what to do.

In the first, published in 2011, Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans had 27 officers shoot at an opponent who either shot back with coloured soap cartridges or did not. Under that threat, accuracy fell in both groups at first. One group then trained with the opponent shooting back; the other trained without. Afterwards, "shot accuracy of the experimental group no longer deteriorated under anxiety", and the gain was still there four months later. The authors' own conclusion is hedged: they say training with anxiety may have positive effects in both the short and the long term.⁶

In the second, published in 2015, Nieuwenhuys and colleagues tested 57 officers on a video test of whether to shoot at a suspect who appeared with or without a gun, with a device that could fire small plastic bullets at them switched on or off. Under threat, officers made more mistakes of shooting at a suspect who held no gun. The officers were then split into four practice groups for three weeks. The mistakes "persisted" in every group, and the authors concluded that the effect of threat on these decisions "may be hard to prevent within the limits of available practice".⁷ This course read both abstracts only.

Put side by side (the course's pairing, not the authors'): practice with an opponent who shot back helped a practised movement hold up, while three weeks of practice, of kinds the second abstract doesn't describe, left the split-second decision errors where they were. The designs differ, so this is a pointer, not a comparison. Both results came from practice with real equipment; neither came from reading. And both groups were police officers with firearms, which is a long way from anyone reading this lesson. Lesson 12, "Resistance training, and choosing a class", takes up what that means for a class.

Deciding before the moment

If judgement under threat is hard to fix with practice, one response is to make some decisions in advance, so that fewer are left for the moment itself. That is this course's inference from the 2015 result, not something any study here tested: nobody has measured whether a person who decides ahead of time what they would do if someone demanded their phone does better than one who has not. In this course's labels, sensible, untested. The exercise at the end asks you to write one such decision, for property, with its source.

Hand it over, or resist?

Lesson 8 gave four signals that talking has stopped being the right tool, and the fourth was a demand for your property, or for you. This is the rung after that. It is also a question on which careful researchers disagree, so in this course's labels it is contested, and this section gives each side in its own words before saying what they share.

First, the law, which neither side's case turns on. This is general information, not legal advice. The law differs by state, and between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. No source this course read suggests that the law anywhere it covers requires a victim of robbery to hand property over, or to resist; lesson 13, "The law on using force", sets out what the law does say about force.

The case for handing it over

The official advice this course read all points one way. London's Metropolitan Police (the Met) has a page on street robbery that ends: "if you're threatened with violence, don't risk your personal safety. Property can be replaced, you can't."⁹ The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, in its brochure Guarding Against Robbery and Assault, says, under the heading "If Someone Tries to Rob You": "Don't resist." Its next words tell you to give up your property, not your life, and the same heading lists running away, hiding and screaming as ways of avoiding a crime in the first place. On carjacking the brochure is blunter still: "If the carjacker threatens you with a gun or other weapon, GIVE UP YOUR CAR!"¹⁰ And the US workplace regulator, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), in its recommendations for late-night shops, which lesson 9 quoted, lists among the topics staff training may include "turning over money or valuables without resistance".¹¹

Three studies are often cited in this argument and are set out here, though none of the official pages cites them, and the third fits this side poorly.

A study that followed 460 shop robberies. Faulkner, Landsittel and Hendricks followed 460 robberies of convenience stores in the US over 1995 and 1996, using police reports, interviews with employees, evaluations of the stores and census data, and published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine in 2001. "Injury risk was strongly associated with ... employee resistance". The abstract lists resistance alongside several other things linked to injury, among them robberies without firearms or money taken, stores with limited escape routes and older clerks, and it notes "Numerous intercorrelations between these characteristics".¹² The abstract is silent on whether the injury came before or after the resistance.

A Home Office study of police records. Smith's The nature of personal robbery, Home Office Research Study 254, published in 2003, went through nearly 2,000 police crime reports and witness statements from seven police areas in England. "One in four robberies involved resistance by the victim in the form of a physical struggle". "Two out of every five (43%) personal robberies resulted in injury of some sort". And: "Female victims were more likely to resist their attacker and, probably as a consequence, more likely to sustain some physical injury".¹³ Notice "probably": the link from resisting to injury is the author's inference from the records, not a sequence the records showed. Smith also found that "robberies involving the use of weapons were less likely to result in physical injury to the victim", and he says himself that his sample may not be representative.¹³

A survey of stranger crimes. Block and Skogan, reporting to the US National Institute of Justice in 1985, analysed rapes, robberies and assaults by strangers in the US National Crime Survey, a victim survey, from 1973 to 1979. This course read the abstract, not the report. "Generally, nonforceful resistance was related to more favorable victim outcomes. Victims who resisted by screaming, running away, reasoning with their attackers, or other nonforceful means were less likely to be injured and more likely to avoid completion of the crime." The abstract names its own limits: the survey "excludes crimes in which the victim dies, and it does not obtain data on the sequencing of victim and offender actions".¹⁴ This one doesn't sit neatly on either side. It found that resisting without force generally went with more favourable outcomes, which is not what "Don't resist" says, though the abstract doesn't say which group it was compared with, and it says nothing about how forceful resistance did. It also says the effects varied with, among other things, "whether or not the offender used a weapon", without saying which way.¹⁴

Put in its proponents' terms, the case runs like this. A robber wants property and wants it fast. A victim who hands it over gives him both, and the encounter ends. The people most at risk of being killed in a robbery may be those who resist, and that is the one outcome a survey of survivors can never record. Property can be replaced. And London's Metropolitan Police, the Washington, DC police and the US workplace regulator all point the same way.

The case that resistance often helps

The other side rests mainly on the US National Crime Victimization Survey, reanalysed with more care about which came first.

Tark and Kleck, in Criminology in 2004, looked at 27,595 incidents of personal contact crime in the survey from 1992 to 2001, and sixteen kinds of self-protection. This course read only their abstract. Its central finding: "self‐protection in general, both forceful and nonforceful, reduced the likelihood of property loss and injury, compared to nonresistance." They explain why earlier research seemed to show the opposite: "The appearance, in past research, of resistance contributing to injury was found to be largely attributable to confusion concerning the sequence of SP actions and injury. In crimes where both occurred, injury followed SP in only 10 percent of the incidents." (SP is their abbreviation for self-protection.) And they conclude: "Combined with the fact that injuries following resistance are almost always relatively minor, victim resistance appears to be generally a wise course of action."¹⁵ The abstract also says: "A variety of mostly forceful tactics, including resistance with a gun, appeared to have the strongest effects in reducing the risk of injury, though some of the findings were unstable due to the small numbers of sample cases." Lesson 15 deals with guns.

Guerette and Santana, in Crime & Delinquency (online in 2008), used the same survey from 1992 to 2004 for robbery and rape. "Greater levels of victim resistance increase the effort needed by offenders, resulting in some cases in a 93% and 92% decrease in the odds of a robbery and rape being completed, respectively, compared to when no resistance is used."¹⁶ Two things about that sentence. The outcome is whether the crime was completed, not whether anyone was hurt. And it comes with a mechanism, which the authors draw from opportunity theory: resistance raises the effort a crime takes. That's the same idea lesson 4 met in the situational prevention grid, under Increase the Effort, applied in the moment rather than in advance.

A police guide from 2010, Monk, Heinonen and Eck's Street Robbery, adds a US figure for what victims said helped, which this course did not check.¹⁷

In its proponents' terms: once you know whether injury came before or after resistance, resistance rarely turns out to have caused it. Not resisting doesn't buy safety when an attacker has already used force. And resistance of both kinds, in Tark and Kleck's abstract, cut the chance of losing property as well as of injury, and in Guerette and Santana's, the chance of the crime being completed.

What each study measured

"Not stated" means the abstract doesn't say, and the three surveys count only survivors. Smith's records showed how robbers approached, and for resistance he wrote "probably". Sources: the studies' abstracts or text as cited above.^121314151617

The flaw both sides share

Look down the columns on the order of events and on the dead, and the problem is plain. Neither side has what would settle it.

The dead aren't in the surveys. Lesson 2 showed that the US crime survey cannot count homicide at all, because, in BJS's words, the survey "is based on interviews with victims".¹⁸ Every survey figure above is about people who lived. If resisting occasionally gets someone killed, that outcome is missing from all of them. ONS's analysis of the Home Office Homicide Index, which does count killings in England and Wales, found that "Furtherance of theft or gain accounted for 5% of homicides (27 offences)" in the year ending March 2025,¹⁹ but that figure says nothing about what those victims did, so it cannot settle the question either.

People choose when to resist. Nobody is randomly assigned to fight back. On this course's reading, which follows the research behind it, people tend to resist where it looks survivable: an unarmed robber, open space, a way out. If so, resisters would look better off partly because of where they resisted, not because of resisting. And the pull runs the other way too: someone who is already being hit may fight back because they're being hit, which makes resisters look worse off. Smith's records show one form of this: in what he calls blitz robberies, the offender uses violence first, to control or stun the victim, and only then takes the property.¹³

The order is rarely known. Only one study in the table reports the order of resistance and injury, Tark and Kleck's, and it found injury came after resistance in only 10% of incidents where both happened.

No trial is possible. Nobody can randomise victims to comply or resist.

So both bodies of evidence are honest, both are partial, and the disagreement between them is, on this course's reading, mostly about what each could see. That's this course's question again, measured on whom and measured as what: surveys of survivors, police records, one set of convenience stores.

Where they agree

In this course's labels the comply-or-resist question is contested, but there is one narrower case where the sources this course read don't pull against each other. When a weapon is shown and all that is wanted is property, the three official sources this course read all point towards handing it over: London's Met, the Washington, DC police and OSHA's list of training topics for late-night shops. Each goes further than that one case: the Met's condition is being threatened with violence, and the DC brochure says "Don't resist" once a robbery is under way, while listing running away and screaming as ways of avoiding one.⁹¹⁰¹¹

The resistance studies' abstracts don't single this case out. None of them reports it on its own, so none speaks to it directly. Guerette and Santana's measure is whether the robbery was completed, that is, whether the property was taken, which that advice has already accepted. Smith's records found injury less likely when a weapon was involved, and Block and Skogan's abstract says the effects varied with whether the offender had a weapon, but not in which direction.¹³¹⁴¹⁶ That the resistance evidence leaves this case alone is this course's reading of the abstracts, not a claim any of the authors made; Tark and Kleck's general conclusion doesn't carve it out either.

Agreement about what to advise is not a verdict on anyone in that moment, whether they froze, handed everything over or fought. Handing everything over doesn't protect everyone: in Smith's blitz robberies, the violence comes first, before any property is taken or asked for.¹³ And people who resisted in this very case didn't choose wrongly either. In every version, the responsibility is the robber's.

At the cash machine

The first case, worked through. Sanjay is using a cash machine set into a bank wall in Derby, in England, at about eleven at night. Two men come up, one on each side. One holds a knife low, by his leg, and says he wants Sanjay's wallet and phone. Sanjay's back is to the machine and the men are either side of him, so walking away is not open to him.

Nothing about the time or the place makes this his doing. The question is only what kind of case it is, and what the evidence says.

What kind of case it is. A weapon is shown, and what is wanted is property. This is the narrow case. The Met's advice, though written for London, fits it exactly: property can be replaced.⁹ The resistance research, read above, doesn't single this case out.¹⁵¹⁶

What his body is likely to do. His body may go on alert, which is Kozlowska's first step, arousal. He may go completely still for a second or two before he can move or speak. On Kozlowska's and Roelofs' accounts, that stillness is the body holding fight or flight on hold and getting ready, not a failure.¹² He may see the knife in sharp detail and almost nothing else, and the men's words may sound far away. That's the direction of Artwohl's findings in officers, carried across by this course.⁵

What happens next. However he responds, the robbers are responsible for what happens. Afterwards there will be a call to make, a report if he wants one, and support whether or not he reports: lesson 16, "Afterwards", covers all of it. And how most people fare in the months after a frightening event is where Mental Fitness lesson 7 starts.

Property or the person

Everything so far is about a demand for things. When the demand is for you, to go somewhere with someone, to get into a car, to be hurt or sexually assaulted, what the sources say changes.

The official robbery advice this course read is about property: give up the bag, the phone, the car. None of those pages gives advice for being told to go with someone, and the DC brochure's line about a person being forced into a car is about lowering the chance of it, not about what to do.¹⁰ The research that bears on it is the resistance research: Block and Skogan's finding that resisting without force, by screaming, running away or reasoning with the attacker, went with better outcomes on average in stranger crimes, rape among them;¹⁴ Tark and Kleck's finding that self-protection in general reduced injury;¹⁵ and the evidence on resistance to rape that lesson 11 sets out, where, in the abstracts this course read, most resistance, forceful or not, went with fewer completed rapes on average and made no significant difference to further injury.

That is as far as any source goes, and it's an average drawn from survivors. In the narrow case, the official advice points to handing property over, and the resistance studies don't single it out. When the demand is for the person, the official pages say nothing, and the only evidence left points, on average, towards resisting.

In the parking garage

The second case is different in one way that matters. Denise is on the fourth level of a parking garage in Wilmington, Delaware, early one evening, unlocking her car. A man she has never seen steps between her and the stairwell, says he has a gun in his pocket, and tells her to get into his car, which is parked beside hers. The elevator is behind him too. She can't simply walk away.

This lesson doesn't say what happened next. Any ending would seem to grade what she did, and whatever happened, it would be his doing, not hers.

What kind of case it is. Nothing he has asked for is property. The demand is for her. So the narrow case, and the agreement that comes with it, does not apply.

What the sources can say. Only what the last section said: no official page covers this moment, and the resistance research points on average towards resisting, resisting without force among it. It cannot say which option, if any, would work here, or whether his gun is real.

What her body may do. Exactly what this lesson's first half described. She may freeze. She may find herself unable to speak, or to think past the next second. None of that is a choice, and none of it would make what happens next her doing.

Why no page can tell her what to do. The moment in front of her is one case, and every figure above is an average from people who survived. Whatever she does, what happens is his responsibility. Lesson 12 is about the classes that practise options like these under pressure, and what the evidence says they can and can't do. And if something like this has happened to you, lesson 16, "Afterwards", and the lines in the note above this section are there whether or not you reported it.

What people get wrong

"Resisting a robber always gets you hurt", and its mirror, "resisting is always safer". Each side's own best studies stop short of either. Smith's "probably as a consequence" and Tark and Kleck's 10% are both about averages, and the dead and the order of events are mostly missing from both.¹³¹⁵

"In an emergency you'll rise to the occasion." Trained police officers' accuracy fell under threat until they practised against an opponent who shot back, and their split-second decisions got worse under threat and stayed worse after three weeks' practice.⁶⁷ Nobody should count on doing better than they have practised, and a page isn't practice.

"Freezing is cowardice." Freezing is part of the defence responses Kozlowska and colleagues describe as automatic, and Roelofs calls it a brake on movement that goes with taking in the scene and preparing to act.¹² It is not chosen, and it is not giving up.

"You'll remember exactly what happened." In Artwohl's survey, 52% of officers lost memory for part of the event and 21% recalled something that hadn't happened.⁵ She writes that missing or inaccurate memories are no reason, on their own, to accuse anyone of lying.

"Above a certain heart rate, your fine motor skills fail at a set number." Self-defence and police training often teach such thresholds. The research behind this course found no peer-reviewed validation of them, so the course prints none.

Practice

Connections

Back. Lesson 1 set out the order of options (avoid, leave, talk, comply or resist, get away), and lesson 8 gave four signals that talking has stopped working; this lesson is the rung after them. Lesson 9's queue in Albany promised an account of why memory and stillness behave as they do under threat. Lesson 2 showed why a survey of survivors cannot count homicide, which is half of the flaw both sides share. Lesson 4's situational prevention grid supplied Guerette and Santana's mechanism, under Increase the Effort.

Forward. Lesson 11, "Sexual assault: the freeze, resistance and the law", applies the defence cascade to tonic immobility and sets out the resistance evidence for rape. Lesson 12, "Resistance training, and choosing a class", asks what a class can train under pressure. Lesson 13, "The law on using force", sets out what the law says, and lesson 16, "Afterwards", covers reporting and support. Mental Fitness lesson 7 shows how most people fare in the months after a potentially traumatic event.

Go deeper

• Smith, The nature of personal robbery, Home Office Research Study 254, 2003, free. Read here: the sections on injury and resistance in full, and the method. A plain account of what nearly 2,000 English robberies looked like on paper, including the different kinds of approach robbers made.
• Artwohl, "Perceptual and Memory Distortions During Officer Involved Shootings", 2008 update of her 2002 article, free. Read here in full. Short, and frank about what her own survey can and cannot show.
• Tark and Kleck, "Resisting crime: the effects of victim action on the outcomes of crimes", Criminology, 2004. Read here: the abstract only. The strongest statement of the case for resistance, in its authors' own words.

Sources

1. Kozlowska, Walker, McLean and Carrive, "Fear and the Defense Cascade: Clinical Implications and Management", Harvard Review of Psychiatry 23(4), 2015, pp. 263 to 287. Read: abstract only.
2. Roelofs, "Freeze for action: neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 372(1718), 2017. Read: abstract only.
3. Bracha, "Freeze, Flight, Fight, Fright, Faint: Adaptationist Perspectives on the Acute Stress Response Spectrum", CNS Spectrums 9(9), 2004, pp. 679 to 685. Read: abstract only.
4. Taylor, Klein, Lewis, Gruenewald, Gurung and Updegraff, "Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight", Psychological Review 107(3), 2000, pp. 411 to 429. Read: abstract only. The 2002 comment on it and the authors' reply were not read.
5. Artwohl, "Perceptual and Memory Distortions During Officer Involved Shootings", AELE workshop paper, 2008 update of her 2002 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin article. Read: in full.
6. Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans, "Training with anxiety: short- and long-term effects on police officers' shooting behavior under pressure", Cognitive Processing 12(3), 2011, pp. 277 to 288. Read: abstract only.
7. Nieuwenhuys, Savelsbergh and Oudejans, "Persistence of threat-induced errors in police officers' shooting decisions", Applied Ergonomics 48, 2015, pp. 263 to 272. Read: abstract only.
8. Support lines in the content note, each read on its service's own page on 25 September 2026: Victim Support (England and Wales), Rape Crisis England & Wales, Victim Support Scotland, Rape Crisis Scotland, Victim Support NI, Rape Crisis Northern Ireland, VictimConnect and RAINN. Read: each page in full, re-read 25 September 2026.
9. Metropolitan Police, "How to protect yourself from street robbery". Read: in full, from Internet Archive capture 20250812180728.
10. Metropolitan Police Department, Washington DC, Guarding Against Robbery and Assault, brochure, January 2011. Read: in full.
11. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Recommendations for Workplace Violence Prevention Programs in Late-Night Retail Establishments, OSHA 3153, 2009. Read: the PDF, searched.
12. Faulkner, Landsittel and Hendricks, "Robbery characteristics and employee injuries in convenience stores", American Journal of Industrial Medicine 40(6), 2001, pp. 703 to 709. Read: abstract only.
13. Smith, The nature of personal robbery, Home Office Research Study 254, January 2003. Read: the sections on injury and resistance in full, and the method.
14. Block and Skogan, Dynamics of Violence Between Strangers: Victim Resistance and Outcomes in Rape, Robbery and Assault, National Institute of Justice, 1985. Read: the NCJRS abstract in full; the report was not read.
15. Tark and Kleck, "Resisting crime: the effects of victim action on the outcomes of crimes", Criminology 42(4), 2004, pp. 861 to 910. Read: abstract only.
16. Guerette and Santana, "Explaining Victim Self-Protective Behavior Effects on Crime Incident Outcomes", Crime & Delinquency 56(2), 2010, pp. 198 to 226, published online 2008. Read: abstract only.
17. Monk, Heinonen and Eck, Street Robbery, Problem-Oriented Guides for Police No. 59, Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, 2010. Read: the offender-targeting section. The government figure behind its footnote was not checked.
18. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization, 2024, September 2025. Read: in full.
19. Office for National Statistics, Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2025, 5 February 2026. Read: sections 1 to 8 in full.