The Social Ecology of Willingness to Report Crime Among LGBTQ+ People

• In Event: Fraught Relations: LGBTQIA2S+ Populations and Police

Abstract

Limited scholarship examines LGBTQ+ people’s willingness to report crime victimization to law enforcement, even though LGBTQ+ people face disproportionate rates of violent victimization. Relatedly, LGBTQ+ people also report higher levels of contact with the police and are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population, suggesting that, like other minoritized groups, LGBTQ+ people face the paradox of being “over-policed and under-protected.” In this context, we ask what affects LGBTQ+ people’s willingness to report crime and whether those factors differ from those of non-LGBTQ+ people. We use a first-of-its-kind national probability sample of both LGBTQ+ (N=803) and non-LGBTQ+ (N=682) people to address these questions. We find that many drivers of willingness to report are common across the two groups, including legal cynicism, race, and age. Interestingly, at the aggregate level, LGBTQ+ people do not report statistically significantly different levels of willingness to report from non-LGBTQ+ people. When disaggregated, however, we find that transgender people and sexual minorities identifying outside of traditional LGB labels (e.g., queer, pansexual) exhibit lower levels of willingness to report. We consider what this means for existing understandings of crime reporting behaviors, as well as why findings may differ across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

Authors

• Stefan Vogler, University of Illinois

• Valerie Jenness, University of California, Irvine