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Risk and Crime

Age 14 to 16
Challenge Level

This resource is part of the collection Should I Risk It?



Take a look at the following statements.

Which of them would you expect to be true?
For those that you think are false, what would you expect the correct statement to say?

  1. The risk to girls of being the victim of a crime is less than 50% of that to boys.
     
  2. Knife crime rates have fallen by nearly 25% since 2009.
     
  3. The risk of being burgled in any given year is more than 3% on average.
     
  4. You are 50% less likely to be very worried about knife crime if you read a tabloid newspaper rather than a broadsheet.

When you have decided what you believe about each of the statements, click the button below to see some more information.


There are 24.6 million households in the UK. (Source: Office for National Statistics)

There were 197,000 domestic burglaries in the UK in 2014/15. (Source: British Crime Survey 2015)




% of children who were the victim of violent crime in England and Wales (2014/15)
(Source: British Crime Survey)		                 Hospital admissions for assault by a sharp object (2014/15)
(Source: Health and Social Care Information Centre)
           
Age Girls Boys   Year Number
10-12 5.1 8.2   2009/10 4647
13-15 3.5 6.2   2010/11 4664
        2011/12 4358
        2012/13 3878
        2013/14 3653
        2014/15 3614
           


Which of the statements do you now think are true?

Can you re-write the statements so that they are true and acknowledge any assumptions that need to be made?



Understanding Uncertainty, Professor Spiegelhalter's website, has lots of articles about probability and risk that you might find interesting. There is a suggestion below, but there's lots more you can explore.
The NRICH Project aims to enrich the mathematical experiences of all learners. To support this aim, members of the NRICH team work in a wide range of capacities, including providing professional development for teachers wishing to embed rich mathematical tasks into everyday classroom practice.
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