Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics

July 2000, NCJ 182990:

Introduction
To law enforcement and the public, sexual assaults, and especially the sexual assaults of young children, are a major social concern. Caretakers worry about such attacks when their children are out of sight. Law enforcement, child protective services, and legislatures work to reduce the incidence of these crimes. However, while a few highly publicized incidents are engraved in the public’s consciousness, there is little empirically-based information on these crimes. Until recently, law enforcement and policymakers had few hard facts on which to base their response to these crimes, their victims, and their offenders.

The only existing national data collection effort that explored the incidence of sexual assault ignored crimes against young victims. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimated there were 197,000 incidents of forcible rape and 110,000 incidents of other sexual assault in the United States in 1996 involving victims ages 12 or above (Ringel, 1997). Victims reported that a third (31%) of these sexual assaults (or 94,000 victimizations) were reported to law enforcement agencies. However, for 1996, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) estimated that there were 96,000 forcible rapes alone reported to law enforcement agencies (FBI, 1997). The UCR does not capture reported crime information on other sexual assaults such as forcible sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling.

However, it can be assumed from their relative volume in the NCVS that tens of thousands of sexual assaults other than forcible rape came to the attention of law enforcement in 1996. The large difference between the NCVS and the UCR estimates may reflect differences in the two data collection methods; or, if both estimates are valid, they indicate that many victims of sexual assault are youth under age 12. Beyond their volume, little is known about the victims, their offenders, and other characteristics of these crimes.

However, the UCR’s relatively new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) has the potential to yield detailed descriptions of sexual assaults reported by participating law enforcement agencies. NIBRS captures a wide range of information on each incident of sexual assault reported to law enforcement. This information includes demographic information on all victims; the levels of victim injury; victims’ perceptions of offenders’ ages, gender, race, and Hispanic ethnicity; and the victim-offender relationships. NIBRS also collects information on all offenses involved in the incident; the types of weapons used; the locations of the incident, the dates and times of the incident; the demographics of arrestees (if any); and the methods of clearance, such as arrest or victim refusal to cooperate with the investigation.

To some, the value of the NIBRS data is limited by the small and non-scientific sample of contributing law enforcement agencies. From 1991 through 1996 the sample of reporting agencies increased; however, even the reporting agencies in the 1996 sample were responsible for less than 10% of the U.S. population. While there is no way to assess the national representativeness of the sample, the number of sexual assault victimizations in the NIBRS sample is very large. Therefore, accepting the inherent qualifications associated with any analysis of NIBRS data, the sheer number of reports and the detailed information available on each crime provides researchers and policymakers with a unique opportunity to study the sexual assaults of young children. ..more.. by Howard N. Snyder, Ph.D., National Center for Juvenile Justice