The International Crime (Victim) Survey was initially launched in 1989 by the Ministry of Justice of the Netherlands and subsequently further developed by the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) in Rome. It is currently the major empirical international comparative research project in the field of crime prevention and criminal justice with particular emphasis on victimisation all over the world.
Although fifty-eight countries participated in the research, only four Southern African countries had previously participated, namely Botswana, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. In the light of this the United Nations African Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (UNAFRI), the Department of Criminology and the Institute for Criminological Sciences (Unisa), as well as the Technikon Southern Africa (Division:Public Safety and Criminal Justice) are collaborating with a view to promoting research and the sharing of expertise in the field of Criminology in Africa. The project has therefore been extended to Lesotho where very little research was previously done in the field of crime and related phenomena.