Exploring Vulnerability to Deviant Coping among Victims of Crime in Two Post-Soviet Cities

Abstract

This study pursues two important goals: 1) assessment of the offender-victim overlap in non-Western cultural contexts and 2) examination of complex moderating influences and mediating factors that help explain the relationship between offending and victimization. Interview data from 700 Ukrainian and 735 Russian adults are used to assess main and interactive effects of theoretical predictors on violent and property offending. Findings reveal a moderate relationship between victimization and offending partially explained by association with deviant peers, self-control, and angry emotions. Moreover, association with deviant peers, depression, and anger appear to condition the relationship. Analyses support and clarify the victim-offender overlap, suggesting it is a universal phenomenon crossing national contexts and that the likelihood of a crime victim becoming an offender is influenced by individual traits, peer relationships, and contemporaneous emotional affect shaping behavioral responses to criminal victimization.

Keywords:

• victimization
• offending
• overlap
• general strain theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For example, early childhood victimization experiences such as abuse and/or neglect have been linked to later involvement in violence (Spatz-Widom 1989). Consistent with GST (Agnew 1992, 2001, 2006), these victimization experiences can be considered specific examples of negative stimuli leading to criminal coping.

2 EM or Expectation-Maximization algorithm uses iterations to replace missing values. The “E” step estimates the conditional expectation for missing data given the value distribution of provided parameters. The “M” step computes, in multiple iterations, the maximum likelihood estimates of these parameters to maximize the complete-data log likelihood from the E-step (IBM SPSS 2013).

3 A range of .2 to .4 is optimal for mean inter-item correlations as it indicates sufficient homogeneity of scale items, with values below .1 indicating low cohesiveness and over .5 item redundancy (Briggs & Cheek, 1986).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mackenzie Kushner

Ms. Mackenzie Kushner was a doctoral candidate in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University at the time of writing this manuscript. She is now a doctoral student at Department of Sociology and Criminology and Law at University of Florida. Her research interests include criminological theory testing.

Ekaterina Botchkovar

Ekaterina Botchkovar is Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. Her research interests include criminological theory development and comparative criminology.

Olena Antonaccio

Olena Antonaccio is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami. Her research interests include theory testing and development and comparative criminology.

Lorine Hughes

Lorine Hughes is Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research interests include youth street gangs, criminological theory testing, and social networks.