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Using Routine Activities Theory To Understand The Murder Of Lily Peters

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Using Routine Activity Theory to Understand the Murder of Lily Peters Introduction Before April 24, 2024, if you were to Google Chippewa Falls, beautiful scenery of the Chippewa River would appear, and a list of fun activities to do in the area, but now articles about the beautiful 10-year-old Lily Peters and her death flood the screen. Every crime has some theory backing it up as to “why” what happened inevitably happened. The murder of Chippewa Falls resident, Lily Peters, aligns with Routine Activities Theory. By viewing the case through the Routine Activity Theory lens, key elements like a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian stand out within this case. All three elements are needed in order to have …show more content…

The motivated offender is Lily’s cousin, Carson. Carson knew her routine and had Lily in the palm of his hand. Clearly Lily was his suitable target, she let her guard down because she was with her cousin- someone she thought she could trust. Lily was completely vulnerable, and only 10 years old, which falls into the desirable age for a suitable target. Lastly, the lack of capable guardianship was just simply going off the main trail where no one could see the murder take place. I have gathered three peer-reviewed studies to further test this theory within other crimes and crimes similar to this one. Hoping to gain more evidence on how routine activity theory applies to Lily Peter’s murder. The first study I looked at was “Individual Offending, Routine Activities, and Activity Settings: Revisiting the Routine Activity Theory of General Deviance,” conducted by Joe Miller. This study looks at “whether a diverse range of both structured and unstructured routine activities is associated with offending, and whether activities have crime-specific effects,” (Miller, 2012). Using data from 15-year-olds from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions, “Principal components analyses identified core routine activities. Random intercepts logistic

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