In Great Britain, racial violence came into the public arena in the 1970's, at a time of several well-publicized incidents; community organizations, trade unions, and antiracist groups then began to document racist outbursts, campaigns of harassment, and the effects of violence on black communities. In February 1981, the Joint Committee Against Racialism presented a report on racial violence to the Home Secretary that proved to be a watershed in the attention paid to racial crimes; since then, a number of crime surveys have attempted to make quantitative estimates of racial violence. This author argues that racial violence and other forms of crime would be better conceptualized as processual rather than as incidental. Difficult conceptual and methodological issues arise when researchers try to reconcile a processual conception of victimization with an inherently static methodology, namely the victimization survey. He suggests that such surveys should be supplemented by qualitative data that may illuminate the processes by which forms of crime are committed and experienced. 9 notes and 91 references