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Context Matters: Violence Against Women and Reporting to Police in Rural, Suburban and Urban Areas

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Abstract

Despite plentiful efforts to identify perpetrator, victim, and incident characteristics correlated with reporting violence against women to police, few studies have addressed the contexts that shape such reporting. Even fewer have examined variations in these contexts across geographic areas. Drawing upon National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1992 through 2009, this paper uses conjunctive analysis of case configurations to identify and investigate the dominant situational contexts of reporting of violence against women to police across rural, suburban, and urban areas. Our findings show that context matters and the importance of incident, perpetrator, and victim characteristics vary across geographic areas.

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Notes

  1. ‘Violence against women,’ in this research refers to violent victimization experienced by females by any perpetrator. Perpetrators may be strangers, family members, friends or intimate partners.

  2. Conjunctive analysis can be conducted using standard software packages such as SPSS and SAS. The analyses presented here were conducted using SPSS. For a full and detailed description of how to conduct conjunctive analysis, as well as the actual code used for a variety of software packages, see Miethe, Hart and Regoeczi (2008).

  3. 540 situational contexts are possible for each of the areas considered (urban, suburban and rural). Taking into consideration the area variable, 1,620 possible situational contexts are theoretically possible as 540 * 3 = 1,620.

  4. If present in the data, these contexts appear above the double thin lines at the top of the table, or below the double thin lines at the bottom of the table.

  5. Only the deviant (more than one standard deviation above and below the mean) and the mean situational contexts are shown in the following tables due to space considerations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, 80217-3364, USA

    Callie Marie Rennison

  2. Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada, L1H 7K4

    Molly Dragiewicz & Walter S. DeKeseredy

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  1. Callie Marie Rennison
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  2. Molly Dragiewicz
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  3. Walter S. DeKeseredy
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Correspondence to Callie Marie Rennison.

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Rennison, C.M., Dragiewicz, M. & DeKeseredy, W.S. Context Matters: Violence Against Women and Reporting to Police in Rural, Suburban and Urban Areas. Am J Crim Just 38, 141–159 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-012-9164-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-012-9164-4

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