The Effects of Prior Victimization on Delinquency Type among Justice-Involved Youths

ABSTRACT

Youth with a history of victimization have an increased risk of delinquency and justice system involvement throughout the life-course but the nature of this relationship is imprecise. This study uses a nationally representative sample of incarcerated youth to examine whether youth with a history of victimization are involved in the justice system for different offenses than non-victimized youth, and the relationship between victimization types (and polyvicitmzation) and offense types. Results indicate that victimized youth were more likely to be system involved for violent offenses, while youths without a history of victimization were more likely to be involved for minor, non-violent offenses.

KEYWORDS:

• child abuse
• intergenerational transmission of violence
• juvenile offenders
• polyvictimization
• violence

Acknowledgments

This research uses data from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP), a study directed by Andrea J. Sedlak, Ph.D., Vice President and Associate Director of Human Services Research at Westat, and funded by grant 2001–JR–BX–K001 from Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Additional Westat staff who made key contributions to the study included Carol Bruce, Ph.D, David Cantor, Ph.D., John Hartge, John Brown, Alfred Bishop, Gary Shapiro, Sheila Krawchuk, Karla McPherson, Ph.D., Monica Basena, Kristin Madden, and Ying Long, as well as many other Westat staff, too numerous to name here. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency also assisted Westat during the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement design, recruitment, and preliminary analyses. Contributing National Council on Crime and Delinquency staff included Madeline Wordes, Ph.D., Eileen Poe-Yamagata, M.S., and Christopher J. Hartney. The author would like to thank Dr. Amy L. Anderson for her critical reviews and commentary on early versions of this manuscript. In addition, thank you the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Victims and Offenders, whose recommendations greatly improved the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The dummy polyvictimization measure was created based off of Finkelhor et al.’s (2005, 2009, 2011) work on polyvictimization using the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire, which measures 34 indicators of offenses against youths that cover 5 general areas of concern (i.e., conventional crime, child maltreatment, peer and sibling victimization, sexual victimization, and witnessing and indirect victimization). They originally defined poly-victimization as experiencing of four or more different types of victimization in different incidents in a given year (i.e., all children with victimization levels above the mean; Finkelhor et al., 2007, 2005). Twenty-two percent of their sample had four or more different kinds of victimizations, or were polyvictims. However, they later noted that victimization by the main caregivers and any sexual victimization have a greater potential for trauma than other forms of victimization and when a child reports these types of experiences, a weight of 4 points should be added if they indicate having been a victim of violence by their main caregivers and of 3 points if they report sexual violence (Finkelhor et al., 2009). Finkelhor et al. (2011) later acknowledged that there is no agreed-upon cutoff point to define polyvictimization and suggested that a broader definition of polyvictimization could be conceptualized as multiple victimization exposures of different kinds for studies that do not utilize the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (e.g., physical and sexual abuse). Additionally, Le et al.’s (2018) review of the polyvictimization literature found no specific numerical threshold was set to define polyvictimization in the 30 studies they reviewed and noted that any approach to define polyvictimization (e.g., cumulative, categorical, empirical) or any timeframe for measurement (i.e., past year or lifetime) was accepted in the studies they reviewed. Although we did not have the number of indicators in the SYRP at our disposal that studies using the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire had, our victimization measures do capture different types of victimization. Thus, we proceeded to create a polyvicitmization measure that mirrored Finkelhor et al. (2005, 2009) based on the means and percentages of youths at each cut point for the count polyvictimization measure.