The Long Arm of Poverty: Extended and Relational Geographies of Child Victimization and Neighborhood Violence Exposures

Abstract

Current models of neighborhood effects on victimization predominantly assume that residential neighborhoods function independent of their surroundings. Yet, a surprising proportion of violence occurs outside of victims’ residential neighborhoods. The current study extends on recent advances in spatial dynamics and neighborhood effects to explore the importance of different geographic scales and relational exposures to poverty for child violent victimization. We examine longitudinal data on over 4400 low-income children from high poverty neighborhoods in five cities, who participated in the Moving to Opportunity randomized intervention. The results suggest that surrounding poverty matters for child victimization beyond the effect of residential poverty. Moreover, moving farther from extreme poverty also seems to buffer against victimization and to amplify the benefits of moving to improved extended (residential and surrounding) neighborhoods. All the children in the study, but especially boys older than 10 years of age, seemed to be affected by the long arm of poverty.

Keywords:

• neighborhood poverty
• extended geography
• violent victimization
• children and youth
• moving to opportunity

Acknowledgments

We thank Jenny Van Hook, Jeremy Staff, Duane Alwin, and Eric Baumer for valuable comments and Ellis Logan and Yosef Bodovski for research support.

Notes

¹ In contrasting a focal neighborhood with surrounding areas, scholars use terminology like residential vs. non-residential (Chaix, Merlo, Subramanian, Lynch, & Chauvin, 2005), local vs. extra-local (Crowder & South, 2008), monadic vs. dyadic (Matthews & Yang, 2013); focal vs. egohoods (Hipp & Boessen, 2013); immediate vs. extended (Graif, 2015). Here we use “extended neighborhood” to refer to residential and nearby neighborhoods.

² In supplementary analyses, alternative indices were included: (a) concentrated disadvantage was based on poverty rate, unemployment rate, female-headed households with children, and families with public assistance income; and (b) extreme disadvantage was based on the upper ninety-fifth percentile of all US tracts.

³ The choice of the geographic scales on the lower end was guided by the literature on the spatial mobility of children and adolescents (Basta et al., 2010) From the perspective of broad processes of structural disadvantage, we might expect poverty and disadvantage to concentrate in sub-regions that are larger than 25 tracts. We thus expanded the lens to 5 miles, consistent with Boessen and Hipp (2015).

⁴ The LPV group was assigned to move to neighborhoods of less than 10% poverty, but as a group they had post assignment exposures to poverty rates larger than 10% because: first, less than half of the families complied with the program requirements; second, among those who complied, many eventually moved to neighborhoods of relatively higher poverty levels than their initial “treatment” neighborhoods; third, the poverty rates of the potential treatment neighborhoods were determined by the program officers at the time of random assignment based on 1990 decennial census data and some of those neighborhoods increased in poverty by the time of the 2000 census.

⁵ Data for 1993–2014. U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. NCVS victimization analysis tool (NVAT) Report: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat (last accessed 08/02/2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corina Graif

Corina Graif is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology and a Research Associate at the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University. She received a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She studies the spatial stratification, mobility, and neighborhood effects on risk and crime. Her work is published in Criminology, City and Community, Population and Environment, Social Networks, American Journal of Epidemiology, Social Psychology Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, Social Science and Medicine, and Homicide Studies among others. Her projects have been awarded the Roy C. Buck Award from Penn State and the H. T. Fischer Prize for Excellence in GIS from Harvard University and recognized by the American Sociological Association’s Sections on Community and Urban Sociology and on Children and Youth. She received research grants from the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Stephen A. Matthews

Stephen A. Matthews is a Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Demography (courtesy Geography), and Director of the Graduate Program in Demography at Pennsylvania State University. His interests are wide ranging although focus on the general theme of spatial inequality in health and demographic research. Many of the substantive questions he examines depend on the definition and operationalization of neighborhood and the measurement of neighborhood characteristics. In recent work, he has collaborated on projects examining activity spaces. Matthews holds a BSc in Geography at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, and a PhD in Planning from the University of Wales, Cardiff, United Kingdom.