Victimization Among Female and Male Sexual Minority Status Groups: Evidence From the British Crime Survey 2007–2010

Abstract

International surveys of victims show crime rates in England and Wales, including hate crimes, are among the highest in Europe. Nevertheless, sexual minority status is a less considered risk factor in general victimization research. This study used sexual minority status and sex to predict victimization across British Crime Surveys from 2007–2010. Logistic regression analyses showed sexual minority status groups were more likely than heterosexuals to be victimized from any and some specific crimes. However, bisexuals rather than lesbians or gay men were more consistently victimized, notably by sexual attacks and within the household. Implications for understanding victimization among these groups are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• victimization
• sexual minority status
• specific crimes

Notes

1. Since 2009–2010, the BCS has asked respondents whether they experienced crimes on the grounds of their sexual orientation (Dick, 2009b) although the research does not consider this data.

2. In each of its annual waves, the BCS aims to recruit over 40,000 individuals aged 16 years or older living in private households using a mixture of stratified and random sampling of post code addresses across all the police force areas of England and Wales to produce a representative sample of that population.

3. Individually weighted Non-Victim Form data is used that asks respondents to report their victimization experiences in the 12 months prior to completing the survey.

4. The article does not focus on victimization and sexuality per se but on sexual minority status as a predictor of victimization. Thus the inclusion of heterosexuals in the sample is for statistical analysis purposes. There are fundamental difficulties in estimating the size of sexual minority status populations (Aspinall, 2009), and these vary from under 1% to 10% of the total population (Aspinall, 2009). However, in large social surveys such as the BCS, the sample size is usually around 2.0%–2.5% of the total sample size (Aspinall, 2009). Thus the results presented should be interpreted with these caveats in mind.

5. The demographic variables of age, education level, and ethnicity were not used as covariates because their inclusion rendered some cell sizes too small for SPSS to run the analyses. Therefore, rather than run such analyses for small parts of the data set, the decision was made to exclude these variables so that the results could be interpreted with more coherency than this small partial analysis would enable. However, the authors recognize this possible limitation but justify it given the disadvantage of running partial analyses and the richness of the data in other respects.