The Effect of Victim’s Self-protective Actions on Violent Crime Development and Victim Injury

• In Event: Drugs, Victimization, and Public Policy

Abstract

Victims want to employ self-protective actions to avoid injury when they face a violent crime situation. However, current research provides yet little intelligence on optimal defense strategies for victims. Of particular interest is the long-debated utility of defensive gun use. In this study, we used the 23-year data of the National Crime Victimization Survey from 1992 to 2014 to serve two important goals. First, we assessed whether victims’ self-protective actions, including defensive gun use, were effective in preventing victim injuries that accompany further crime development. Second, we identified the contexts in which these self-protective actions were successful in reducing injury to the victim. All analyses used a penalized likelihood logistic regression approach to account for the rarity of case events in our sample. Tentative results indicate passive self-protective actions, e.g., running away or calling the police, were effective in preventing further crime development and victim injury. Conversely, forceful strategies such as attacking offenders with guns or knives were not as effective as previously reported in the literature; they were statistically insignificant or rather increased the risk of injury. Moreover, virtually all the self-protective actions were ineffective especially when offenders were armed with guns.

Authors

• SeungHoon Han, University of Nebraska at Omaha

• Erik Jorgenson, Columbia University

• Charles Branas, Columbia University