Race and Victim-Offender Trajectories

• In Event: Issues of Race and Ethnicity across the Life Course

Abstract

The age-crime curve for offending is a well-established empirical observation indicating the peak age for criminal activity. More recently, latent group trajectory analyses have found different trajectories, or pathways, for different groups. Separately, victimization research has found similar peak ages for victimization, but has only begun to explore varying trajectories of victimization. The present study uses longitudinal offending and victimization data from the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) from the United Kingdom to analyze both the violent victimization trajectories and violent offending trajectories for the same panel of participants in order to establish the overlap in age-based trajectories for these outcomes. Racial effects are then estimated for predicting overlap trajectory membership. Results indicate six distinct victim-offender trajectories with significant differences by race.

Authors

• Brian Lunn, Western Michigan University

• Whitney DeCamp, Western Michigan University

• Heather Zaykowski, University of Massachusetts, Boston