Age, Criminal Victimization, and Offending: Changing Relationships from Adolescence to Middle Adulthood

Abstract

The finding that Victims & Offenders are often the same individuals has led to attempts at explaining the positive correlation between victimization and offending. Much of the evidence for the positive relationship between victimization and offending, however, is based on samples of adolescents and young adults or on data with other limitations. In the present study, we use longitudinal self-report data on victimization and offending in a national probability sample to examine the impacts of victimization on offending and offending on victimization, controlling for sociodemographic and theoretical predictors of both, to see whether the relationship is consistent across the life course from adolescence to early middle age. The results suggest that the relationship between being a perpetrator and being a victim of crime changes over the life course, and that explanations for the victimization-offending relationship need to take this life course variation into account.

Keywords:

• victimization
• offending
• age
• changing relationships

Acknowledgments

Work on this project was supported in part by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (AA11949), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA015983), and the Crime Victims Institute at Sam Houston State University.

Notes

1. Linear interpolation could not be used with the offending variables for two reasons, circularity (the dependent variable would be used in constructing the interpolated value to predict itself) and intermittency. With regard to intermittency, past research has suggested that illegal behavior and especially victimization tend not to be continuous across the life course, but that instead victimization careers are marked by years in which victimization occurs, interspersed with years in which no victimization occurs (e.g., Menard, 2000; Menard & Huizinga, 2001). Linear interpolation was not used for the oldest age group because there were two waves of contiguous data (2002 and 2003), and interpolation to data on predictors for 2001 (for 2002 dependent variables) would involve interpolation over a nine-year span, nearly identical to analysis with no time lag at all. For the early middle age respondents, therefore, results are based on a single wave each for the dependent variables (2003) and the predictors (2002), with correct time ordering between the two. Comparison of the results used in the main analysis presented here with both results using the longer time lags and results using no time lag (in which the cause may be measured subsequent to the effect) indicated interpolation produced results intermediate between the results using the longer time lag and no time lag with respect to explained variance (R²), the magnitude of the regression coefficients, and the likelihood of getting statistically significant results; but that the linear interpolation results had much more similar inferential results and substantive conclusions as the analysis with no time lag, including but not limited to the relationship between victimization and offending.