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ABSTRACT
Using data from the 2015 National Crime Victimization Survey, this research explores the characteristics related to psychological distress and formal help-seeking behavior among victims of violent crime. Logistic regression analyses indicate that psychological distress symptoms vary by victim and offense characteristics. As anticipated, for example, the odds of a victim of sexual assault reporting the highest level of psychological distress are 5.88 times higher than are the odds of simple assault victims. However, when looking at subsequent formal help-seeking behavior for psychological distress, sexual assault victims do not seek formal help for their distress more than victims of other violent crimes. The analyses reveal that only gender and disability consistently predict high psychological distress and formal help-seeking behavior. Contact with a victim service agency was shown to be a powerful predictor of formal help-seeking behavior, though the analyses illustrated that victims most in need of intervention are not always the ones who receive it. In fact, only 23% of victims sought formal help for their psychological distress. This study sheds additional light on the issue of psychological distress and the limited formal help-seeking behavior of violent crime victims, while illustrating characteristics predictive of formal help-seeking, such as intervention through victim services.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Participants were also asked an eighth question regarding distress. The question was: Still thinking about your distress associated with being a victim of this crime did you feel any of the following ways for A MONTH OR MORE? Did you feel some other way? The reliability showed this item to decrease the scale alpha to .790, and to correlate with the other items at .120. Additionally, the factor analysis showed a second component when this item was included in the scale. For these reasons, the “other” measure was excluded from the final scale for psychological distress.
2. While ideally all victims would have been asked about their psychological distress symptoms, only those reporting moderate or severe distress were asked the follow-up questions regarding symptoms and formal help-seeking behavior. The decision was made to incorporate all of the victims into the analysis to keep important information that would have been lost by eliminating all victims who reported no distress or mild distress. Due to our use of a dichotomous indicator variable identifying those with the highest level of psychological distress, we felt a strong argument could be made for categorizing the no distress and mild distress victims as not experiencing the highest levels of psychological distress.