Harms After Victimization: Experiences and Needs (HAVEN), a novel conceptual framework designed to measure victim harms from violence, may serve as a blueprint for determining the multifaceted harms and costs linked to violent victimization, according to a study published in Justice Quarterly.

Findings from the analysis of the HAVEN framework — which sought to estimate monetary harms of violent crime victimization by integrating criminal justice, emergency, health care, household, educational, social services, and property costs accrued by individual victims — were anchored by cross-sector data from the Camden Coalition’s Camden Administrative Records Integration for Service Excellence (ARISE) program.

Our Camden ARISE dataset includes county-level  health and medical encounter data representative of South Jersey, integrated with incident-level data from the Camden County Police Department. ARISE data pertinent to Camden County residents, as well as data from our partners at Allegheny County Department of Human Services, were pivotal to the HAVEN investigators’ work to establish victim cohorts and estimating costs associated with crime victimization.

The authors concluded that linking police and court records with health system data is vital to accurately identify victimizations and establish the complete scope of victim harms that often go overlooked in traditional analyses. They noted there remains a need for future research that helps to expand data integration efforts across more jurisdictions as is being done in Camden, and to better account for the confounding factors of post-victimization health outcomes by refining the statistical modeling techniques used.