An excerpt from my book where I look at the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) from 2015 up to and including 2019 (pre-pandemic).
2.6 Violence Against Women
It is essential to characterize some differences between the sexes in violent crime victimization:
- Men were victimized more in aggravated assault and robbery when the victim was not injured.
- Women and men are victimized about the same in aggravated assault and robbery when the victim is injured.
- Women are by far the majority victim in injurious rape/sexual assault.
- Men are by far the majority victim in homicide.
The elephant in the room is: how much injurious violent crime is violence against women? One way to estimate it is to apply NCVS percentages to UCR statistics. In doing so, we come up with these percentages for victim sex in injurious violent crime:
- Men = 37.5%
- Women = 62.5%
This result shows that injurious violent crime is predominately violence against women. The derivation of these percentages is detailed in Appendix A. Here is a short summary:
- The UCR mixes aggravated assault and robbery with rape and homicide. Aggravated assault and robbery can be both injurious and non-injurious, while rape and homicide are always considered injurious (and fatal in the case of homicide).
- Aggravated assault and robbery make up 89 percent of the violent crime in this period.
- The NCVS says that aggravated assault and robbery result in victim injury around 33 percent of the time.
- When the victim is injured in an aggravated assault or robbery, the victim sex percentages change from predominately male in non-injurious cases to about a 50/50 split for injurious.
- There is considerable police reporting bias around crimes where the victim knows the offender. Rape is a crime where the offender is almost always someone the victim knows. Hence, the police reporting bias is more significant with rape (in addition to other factors, such as the humiliation of the victim and the prospects of a criminal trial). Compensating for the police reporting bias leads to a substantial increase in victims of rape.
- Rape is a crime where the victim is predominately a woman.
- Homicide is a crime where the victim is predominately a male.
- Homicide is only 1.3 percent of violent crime in this period.
Hence, injurious aggravated assault and injurious robbery show the victim’s sex to be about 50/50. However, compensating for the unreported nature of rape increases the victim’s sex to female since most victims of rape are female. Even though homicide has predominately male victims, homicide is not underreported and is a much smaller percentage of overall violent crime.
Note that this estimate may be higher than actual because no statistical methods of violent crime capture a woman unwilling to report a crime to the police (which impacts the UCR) or admit that a crime occurred (which affects the NCVS). If a woman convinces herself that a crime didn’t happen, there is no crime victim. This fact leads us to an uncomfortable truth:
- Women are the victims of injurious violent crime more than men. Men are victims of non-injurious violent crime more than women.
[..]
If you are interested in my book, you can buy it from all the online retailers. Links are here. In addition, I have my own store for electronic copies – in PDF format and epub format. Also, there is additional NCVS research I did that you can purchase as well. Enjoy!