NCJ Number
227130
Journal
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency Volume: 46 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2009 Pages: 245-269
Date Published
May 2009
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This study explored how gender interacts with opportunity and school-based victimization.
Abstract
Findings reveal that criminal opportunity significantly predicts school-based adolescent victimization. Gender-specific hierarchical logistic regression models indicate that measures of criminal opportunity were significantly related to theft and assault for both sexes. Equality-of-coefficient tests supported gendered effects for some opportunity indicators, with differences indicating that the effects of risk and protective factors for victimization were heightened for girls. Results support previous research pointing to the perceived vulnerability of female targets on the part of offenders. The specific ways in which gender-conditioned opportunity indicators varied across type of victimization remain in question. Opportunity structures that facilitate one type of victimization are not necessarily conducive to all types of victimization. Nonetheless, the measures of opportunity-related risk and protective factors were not obviously crime specific, and therefore expected to exhibit similar main effects and conditional effects, conditional on gender, across theft and assault models. One risk factor that was moderated by gender regardless of crime type was self-reported criminal involvement. It was the strongest predictor of both theft and violent victimization for female students, and its effects was much larger than for male students. Data were collected from 10,522 students in 111 middle and high schools throughout Kentucky from 2001 to 2004. Tables, notes, and references