Exploring Violent Crime Reporting among School-Age Victims: Findings from NCVS SCS 2005-2015

ABSTRACT

Most studies on the reporting of crimes to the police have focused on adult victims. Less is known, however, regarding crime reporting behavior among school-age victims. This paper presents findings from an exploratory study of violent crime reporting decision-making among school-age victims. It used six waves of data from NCVS SCS and thus seeks answers two research questions: 1) what are the major reasons for school-age victims not reporting crimes to the police? 2) What indicators are related to school-age victims’ violent crime reporting decision-making? Incorporating variables employed in research on adult victims, the current study found that besides reporting crimes to the police, children frequently reported crimes to school officials, and they often decided to take care of incidents by themselves. Unfamiliarity with an offender was a significant predictor of dealing with crimes formally (i.e., reporting crimes to the police or school officials) by children. However, if they have decided to treat crimes formally, offender’s age, offender’s sex, and whether they get injured became more important in predicting reporting crimes to the police. Theoretical implications, policy implications, and future research are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• NCVS
• crime reporting
• school-age victim

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the current study, school-age victims are victims who are 12–18 years old.

2. In 1989 and 1995, SCS interviewed household member ages 12 to 19.

3. It does not mean, however, that property crime cannot cause injury to victims.

4. We treated each of these cases, which involved repeated victims, as a separate case. We did not measure if the victim was a repeated victim for two important reasons. First, the NCVS SCS dataset did not contain temporal information of these incidents. Therefore, we could not know which incident occurred before the others. Second, the NCVS SCS only asked respondents their victimization in the current school year. There was no way we could know if respondents had been victimized beyond the current school year. In other words, respondents could be a repeated victim but the NCVS SCS could not catch this information.

5. Cases with multiple offenders represented a small proportion of total cases. For example, in 2015, there were seven violent crimes with multiple offenders. Adding multiple-offender incidents might also cause problems of identifying values for other independent variables, such as gender, age, race, and weapon use.

6. Cases were deleted from multivariate analysis because they had missing values on offender characteristics or incident characteristics. Data were missing at random on whether reporting to the police (p = 0.29).

7. Nine incidents did not include why not report the crime to the police.