Summary. This project develops and disseminates statistics on juvenile victims, based on the analysis of a number of existing and emerging data sets. Sources used thus far include the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), and the Survey of Inmates of State (and Federal) Correctional Facilities (SISCF). Of particular interest and utility has been the developing National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which is producing increasing amounts of crime victimization data each year. The project is also active in secondary analysis of data on juvenile victimizations recorded in the second National Incidence Study of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART 2).
In all cases, this project seeks to uncover new and hitherto unknown statistics about juvenile victimizations. Every analysis undertaken depends on a mastery of data sets used. This mastery is essential for effective and reliable use of information available in these often complex records. The project also maintains close communications with the agencies responsible for gathering and disseminating these data sets.
NIBRS Analysis
The advent of NIBRS ushers in a new era in juvenile victim crime statistics. It opens the possibility of identifying child crime victims and analyzing crimes against children at a level of detail that has not been previously possible. A particular focus of this project has been the development of useful, and formerly unavailable, knowledge from this emerging source. Even with only about one-tenth of all law enforcement jurisdictions presently reporting in NIBRS, data are available each year on over 2 million crime victims, of whom at least 10% are juveniles. This large data set is sufficient to begin the process of understanding the particular nature of crime victimization of children.
Even though the data are restricted to offenses reported to police, the lack of NCVS data for young children and the inability to look at juvenile victims in the UCR data mean that many of the descriptive statistics from NIBRS represent a quantum advance in certain kinds of knowledge. Among other things, NIBRS data permit the identification of the child victim proportion of various types of crimes, as well as the rates of police awareness of various particular kinds of child victimizations such as molestations by caretakers, family members and other types of offenders. They also reveal changes in crime patterns across the developmental stages of childhood.
This project has established the CCRC as one of the major centers in the nation in the use and analysis of NIBRS data.
Further analyses of NIBRS data are in progress.
Analysis of Other Data Sets
As noted above, the project continues to analyze existing data sets, seeking statistics on juvenile victimizations that have heretofore been unobserved.
