Gender and Violent Victimization

The recent National Academy of Sciences report on violence against women emphasizes that our knowledge about trends in women's victimization in the United States, particularly within major socio-demographic risk groups, is inadequate. This presents barriers to the scientific understanding of violence against women as well as policy implementation and evaluation. What is needed is careful analysis of long term trends in women's victimization within race/ethnicity, social class, marital status and parenthood, age and type of place (urban, suburban, rural), as well as by victim-offender relationship. The proposed research will pool and appropriately weight the NCS and NCVS to generate estimates of trends from 1973 through 2005 for women and men in these socio-demographic risk groups. The project will then statistically analyze these trends to assess whether there have been significant increases and decreases in the violent victimization of women across these groups. This component of the research will reveal long term changes in victimization among women in high risk groups as compared to lower risk groups. The proposed research also will compare the trends in female's victimization to those of males in the same socio-demographic risk groups. This is essential as the meaning of changes in violence against women depends on whether male victimization is shifting in similar or different ways. In addition to providing long term trend data to NIJ for dissemination, the proposed research will inform scientific studies of violence against women and the crime drop in the United States, and will offer useful benchmarks for developing and assessing policies to address violent victimization.

ca/ncf