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Reporting Thefts Against Juveniles Thefts involving juvenile victims are extremely unlikely to come to police attention—only 10 percent do—much less likely than those involving adult victims (31 percent) (see figure 4). But a substantial percentage of thefts involving juvenile victims are reported to other authorities (29 percent), so that when overall reporting (to any authority) is compared, there is little difference between the percentage of thefts involving juvenile victims and the percentage of thefts involving adult victims reported (39 percent and 38 percent, respectively). About 60 percent of all thefts involving child victims occur in school, and a little more than half (51 percent) of these get reported to some authority, compared with only 22 percent of nonschool thefts involving juvenile victims. This demonstrates the importance of school authorities in arbitrating property crimes for children.
 Although the reporting of thefts is generally correlated with the value of the items stolen, with thefts of valuable items being more likely to be reported, reporting patterns change in an interesting way for juveniles. Items of substantial value (more than $250) stolen from juveniles get reported to some authority nearly half the time, but this is significantly less often than the rate for valuable items stolen from adults (49 percent and 62 percent, respectively). The discrepancy is even greater for police reports (41 percent and 58 percent, respectively). By contrast, thefts from juveniles of small value items (less than $50) are actually more likely to be reported to some authority than thefts of small value items from adults (36 percent and 24 percent, respectively). This is explained by the considerable reporting of small value thefts by juveniles to school authorities. Few such reports (3 percent) go to police. In terms of juvenile victims' ages, the reporting of thefts has a different developmental progression than the reporting of violent crimes (see figure 5). While reports of thefts to police increase from 7 percent to 14 percent between the ages of 12 to 17, reports to any authority actually go through a marked decline after age 14, down to 31 percent from a high of 44 percent. This indicates that older teens are increasingly reluctant to turn to school authorities for justice when their property is stolen.
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