Violent Crime - Victims Of Violent Crimes — Most Are Men

Violent Victimization Rates by Gender, 1973-2001

Men are responsible for most violent crimes. They are also victimized most by violent crimes. The graph charts violent ⁴ victimization rates for men, women and all persons age 12 years and over.

Overall, rates are down across the board. The rate has dropped most precipitously for men, declining 60% between 1973 and 2001. Women too saw a decline in their rate, although a lesser one, it fell by 27%.

Men started the period with a rate of violent victimization (victims per 1,000 adults) of 68 while women had a rate of 31, less than half the men's rate. The rate for men then fluctuated quite a bit over the intervening years. By 2001 the rate for both men and women had dropped, for men it was down to 27 and for women 23 bringing the gender gap in victimization rates to its smallest number for the entire period. Only 4 more men than women (per 1,000 adults) were the victims of a violent crime in 2001. More encouraging still is the fact that the rates of victimization experienced by both men and women in 2001⁵ were the lowest ever recorded since the National Crime Victimization Survey began in 1973.

Men and women suffer different crimes at different rates. The following table shows breakdowns of victimization rates (number per 1,000 people age 12 years or older) by type of crime excluding homicide.

Victimization Rates by Gender for Violent Crimes Committed in 2000

Men are victims of all forms of violent crime other than rape and sexual assault at higher rates than are women. Murder is no exception. Men account for three-quarters of all murder victims.

Apart from the kinds of crimes they suffer, men and women's rates of victimization differ in another way. Women are victimized by people they know far more often than are men (and women victimize people they know at a higher rate, as we saw in the previous panel). In the 1992-93 period, women experienced 7 times as many incidents of non-fatal violence by an intimate (husband, ex-husband, boyfriend or ex-boyfriend) as did men. On average, woman experience 1 million violent victimizations by an intimate every year compared to about 143,000 incidents that men experience. In general, when it comes to non-fatal violence by a lone offender, women report knowing their assailants in 78% of the cases while men know their assailants in only half (51%).

The year 1994 was a peak crime year. For women it was a particularly bad year. The rate of female victimization hit a high of 43 per 1,000 adult women. The men's rate jumped that year as well but was far short of its high rate for the period experienced in 1977. Nobody knows for sure why women took the brunt of the increased violence during the years 1992 to 1994. Since then, their numbers have again dropped.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Key Facts at a Glance, "Violent Victimization Rates by Gender, 1973-2001, September 2002, available online at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables.