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This article presents the findings of a study of the victimisation of three cohorts of young people living in a county town in the East Midlands. Following a brief review of research into contemporary youth victimisation in the UK, it reports the findings of the study and discusses the reasons for variations in rates of victimisation between the three cohorts. It concludes with a discussion of the implications for professionals.

The purpose of this study was to explore human factors as the possible facilitator of cyber-dependent (hacking and malware infection) and cyber-enabled (phishing) crimes victimisation and to test the applicability of lifestyle routine activities theory (LRAT) to cybercrime victimisation.

A mixed methods research paradigm was applied to address the research questions and aims. The data set of Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) 2014/2015 and 42 semi-structured interviews conducted with victims of cybercrime and non-victim control group participants were analysed via binary logistic regression and content analyses methods.

This research illustrated that Internet users facilitated their victimisation through their online activities. Additionally, using insecure Internet connections and public access computers emerged as risk factors for both cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crime victimisation. Voluntary and involuntary personal information disclosure through social networking sites and online advertisement websites increased the likelihood of being a target of phishing. Deviant online activities such as free streaming or peer-to-peer sharing emerged to increase the risk of cyber-dependent crime victimisation.

The binary logistic regression analysis results suggested LRAT as a more suitable theoretical framework for cyber-dependent crime victimisation. Future research may test this result with models including more macro variables.

Policymakers may consider implementing regulations regarding limiting the type of information required to login to free Wi-Fi connections. Checking trust signs and green padlocks may be effective safeguarding measures to lessen the adverse impacts of impulsive buying.

This study empirically illustrated that, besides individual-level factors, macro-level factors such as electronic devices being utilised to access the Internet and data breaches of large companies also increased the likelihood of becoming the victim of cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crime.

To review the literature on delinquency and victimization among Caribbean youth, utilizing an ecological perspective.

The review was initiated by a search of peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1993 and 2013, which investigated any or all aspects of juvenile delinquency and/or youth victimization in the Caribbean. Studies were critically reviewed to determine whether they addressed relationships between victimization and delinquency, and the role of the social environment on youth.

The search yielded 23 relevant studies: 64 percent of the studies were conducted exclusively in Jamaica, and more than 75 percent were school based. Half of the articles addressed the links between victimization and delinquency among Caribbean youth but the majority was primarily descriptive.

Only peer-reviewed journals were included, so unpublished country and organizational reports were not covered in the review.

More current and longitudinal studies are needed, which examine the connections between delinquency and victimization, and the experiences in the smaller or less developed Caribbean countries.

The review provides directions for the enhancement of positive youth development policy and practice.

This paper fills the gap in the understanding of the research on delinquency and victimization among Caribbean youth. The ecological framework also adds value to the understanding of the topic by highlighting the importance of various social contexts, such as the family, school, and neighborhood, on youth development in the Caribbean.

Understanding the plight of victims has long been a focus of feminists in the field of criminology. Feminists have made a number of contributions to the study of victims, and here we highlight the contributions that coalesce around three central themes: (1) the gendered nature of criminal victimisation, (2) the relationship between women’s victimisation and offending and (3) violent victimisation of women (and threat of victimisation) as a means of informal social control. In this chapter, the authors trace the development of these themes, highlighting both early feminist work and modern instantiations, paying particular attention to how theoretical developments in the field of feminist victimology have contributed to the understanding of these themes. The authors conclude by discussing the contested nature of ‘feminist victimology’, examining whether such a thing can exist given the androcentric foundations on which the broader field of victimology is based.

Previous research has documented a negative association between subjective well-being and different forms of victimization. The present study aims to examine differences in well-being among university student victims of cyber dating abuse and bullying after controlling for acceptance of dating violence.

This a cross-sectional study involving 1,657 Spanish university students (62.1% females, 37.1% males) using a quantitative approach.

The multiple regression analysis results showed that the university students who reported low bullying victimization and low acceptance of dating violence also reported higher emotional, social and psychological well-being, although the association between bullying and well-being was weak. No relationship was found between cyber dating abuse victimization and the well-being dimensions examined (emotional, social and psychological). Indeed, the participants not involved in any form of abuse and the cyber dating abuse victims presented the highest level of emotional, social and psychological well-being compared to the bullying victims and the combined victims.

Prevention and intervention programs need to specifically address bullying and cyber dating abusive in university, with a special focus on normative beliefs about both types of victimization and offering different sources of support to overcome negative consequences on mental health.

This paper analyzes the subjective well-being correlates simultaneously in victims of cyber dating abuse and bullying among university students without assuming that every form of victimization has the same mental health outcomes.

Cybercrime rates have increased rapidly during the last couple of decades, resulting in cybercrimes becoming common crimes. However, most victims do not report cybercrimes to the police. Therefore, this study examines reporting cybercrime victimization and provides insights into the role of the police in this process.

A sample of 595 individuals was used. All respondents were shown three vignettes about hypothetical cybercrime victimization and were asked to imagine that this situation happened to them. Four crime and reporting characteristics were manipulated across vignettes. Respondents' intentions to report to the police and to other organizations were used as the dependent variables in regression analyses. Four random factors in the vignettes (i.e. type of crime, seriousness of crime, victim–perpetrator relationship, and reporting modality), as well as several characteristics of the respondents were included in the regression models as independent variables.

The type of cybercrime is the most important predictor for reporting behaviors. Other determinants are: more serious offenses were more often reported and offenses are less often reported in situations where the victim personally knows the perpetrator. Furthermore, there is large discrepancy between intended and actual cybercrime reporting. These findings provide valuable insights into the factors that influence reporting behavior in the real world. Only a fifth of respondents indicated that they would not report cybercrime victimization to the police. This implies that attempts at improving reporting rates should not solely be focused on improving people's attitudes, but also on removing obstacles to turn these attitudes into actions.

In the current study, the authors contribute to the existing literature by asking a large sample from the general population in the Netherlands about both their intended reporting behavior (i.e. a vignette study) and their actual reporting behavior (i.e. self-reports) of victimization of a wide variety of different types of cybercrime. Determinants of both reporting to the police as well as to other organizations are examined. Moreover, respondents are asked about motivations behind their decision to (not) report a cybercrime to the police. Last, people were asked about their past experiences with reporting cybercrime victimization to the police.

Physical victimization at school is little studied in impoverished developing country contexts. Moreover, the role of school and classroom contexts as risk factors remains poorly understood.

The aim of the study is to investigate the prevalence of physical victimization in rural Chinese middle schools as well as the individual, teacher/classroom, and school-level risk factors associated with experiencing physical victimization.

We use two waves of longitudinal, representative survey data to perform a multilevel logistic regression analysis (MLRA) of physical victimization among middle school students from 100 villages in one of China’s poorest provinces. We focus on a subset of questionnaire items that were gathered from students when the sampled children were 13–16 years old. We also utilize student data from the first wave of the survey to control for prior internalizing problems and academic achievement. Finally, we link matched data collected from principal and teacher questionnaires to examine the risk factors for physical victimization associated with students’ microclimates and the wider school environment.

A substantial proportion of middle school students (40%) reported having been beaten by classmates. Elevated risk was found among males; students with prior poor performance in language; students with past internalizing problems; students of female teachers and teachers evaluated as low performing; students in disruptive classrooms; and students in classrooms undergoing mandated reforms.

These findings suggest that efforts to reduce school violence should not only focus on the deficits of individual students, but rather should target practices to alter the within school risk factors associated with microclimates.

The present study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Ad Health) to evaluate the effects of exposure to violent victimization in childhood on adolescent delinquency and subsequent adult criminality.

Using Longitudinal Latent Class Analysis (LLCA), the present study investigates whether there are distinct and diverse longitudinal delinquency trajectories among those exposed to violence in childhood.

Findings from the current study indicate that there are three distinct trajectories of delinquency and offending from age 14 to 27 for both males and females exposed to violence in childhood. Further, it appears that violent victimization in childhood bridges the gender gap in delinquency between males and females. Thus, childhood violent victimization, and the fact that females are victimized by parents/caregivers and romantic partners at higher rates than males, might be partially responsible in explaining the narrowing of the gender gap between male and female offending in the recent decades. At the same time, childhood violent victimization also seems to impact males and females in somewhat different ways. Practically, all female victims stop offending by their late 20s, whereas a fairly large proportion of males exposed to violent victimization in childhood steadily continue offending.

Although this study was able to identify the diverse impacts of violence exposure on engagement in subsequent delinquency, it did not examine the unique contributions of each type of violence on adolescent outcomes or the chronicity of exposure to each of these types of violent victimization. We were also not able to measure all types of violence experiences in childhood, such as exposure to parents’ or caregivers’ intimate partner violence.

While early prevention would be the most desirable option for both genders for the most optimal outcome, the retrospective intervention and treatment programs should be gender-specific. For males, they should heavily focus on providing alternative ways to cope with anger, impulse control and frustration, as well as teach empathy, cognitive problem solving skills, verbal communication skills, and tangible life and job skills. For females, most successful intervention and treatment programs may focus on helping the girls through a transition from adolescence to adulthood while providing mental health, medical, and family support services.

The paper uses a unique methodological approach to identify distinct and diverse longitudinal delinquency trajectories. The findings demonstrate how more resilient individuals (in terms of externalizing behaviors) can bring down the mean scores of delinquency even though many other individuals can be severely affected by violence exposure in childhood.

As a growing population of students in the U.S. education system, it is important to study the extent to which Latino students experience bullying victimization. In this study, a nationally representative sample of Latino high school students is analyzed for this purpose.

Data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 including students’ family immigration, participation in extracurricular activities, and reports of bullying victimization are analyzed. In order to make comparisons within the sample of Latino students, the sample is disaggregated between students attending school in new Latino immigrant destinations and traditional Latino immigrant destinations. Poisson regression is used in all multivariate analyses.

In new Latino destinations, Latino students are just as likely to report being bullied as white students. In addition, in new destinations Latino students are bullied in connection with participating inhumanities-related extracurricular activities. Further, they are more likely to be bullied for this participation in comparison to students of other races/ethnicities. Finally, these relationships are significant even after accounting for the fact that third generation, more established students are more likely to report being bullied.

Teachers, school administrators, parents, and researchers should be aware that Latino students can be bullied based on status-conferring activities such as extracurricular activities. This appears to be most pronounced in new Latino immigrant destinations where there is recent influx of Latinos. Efforts to prevent bullying in these areas can be combined with programs that seek to promote cross-ethnic understanding and academic/extracurricular enrichment.

This study provides valuable information on the experience of Latino students and bullying victimization.

The evolution of digital technology has changed the way in which we, as a global society, socialise and conduct business. This growth has led to an increasing reliance on technology, much more interconnectedness and in turn, an expansion of criminal opportunities, known now as “cybercrime”. This study aims to explore the experience of victimisation, perceptions of cybercrime and use of online crime prevention strategies.

The study involved a survey of a representative sample of the adult Australian population. The study sample was made up of 595 Australian adult participants. The study seeks to better understand how previous victimisation, perception of cybercrime prevalence and perception of harm caused by cybercrime are related to the use of online crime prevention strategies. It seeks to contribute to a body of work that has found that crime prevention education focused on increasing knowledge is limited in its effectiveness in reducing victimisation.

This study identifies key levers, in particular perceived prevalence and harm of cybercrime, as critical in the use of online crime prevention strategies by potential victims.

As such, this study provides an important evidence base on which to develop more effective online crime prevention education and awareness campaigns to reduce cybervictimisation.

The practical implications include the relationship between cybervictimisation and self-protective online strategies of potential victims and the development of more effective online crime prevention programmes.

The research takes a different perspective from much of the previous research, seeking to better understand how attitudinal factors (perceived prevalence of cybercrime and perceived harm of cybercrime) might motivate or influence the use of online crime prevention strategies by potential victims.