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Discussion Crimes involving juvenile victims appear to be underreported in absolute terms and in comparison with adults. For violent crimes, this underreporting is not explained by the victimization of juveniles being less serious, as measured by such standards as injury or weapon usage. Nor is it explained by the tendency of juveniles to report crimes to school authorities rather than to police. The underreporting is evident even for the most serious offenses and even when taking into account reports to other authorities. Part of the explanation is that juvenile victims are more likely to be victimized by juvenile perpetrators, and crimes committed by juveniles are less likely to be reported. However, this is not a complete explanation: in a multivariate analysis not shown here, even when controlling for juvenile offenders, juvenile victims were still associated with underreporting (Finkelhor and Ormrod, 1999). NCVS interviewers ask victims to explain their failure to report crimes to the police, but the unstructured responses, which were not obtained from all respondents, are of somewhat limited analytical usefulness. Juvenile victims explained their nonreporting in much the same ways as adults with only a few notable differences (see table 1). Juveniles cited "reported to another official" as a reason for not making a report to police more often than adults for both violent crime and theft. Juveniles were also more likely than adults to discount their violent victimizations as minor or "kid stuff," probably reflecting the popular perception that juvenile-on-juvenile violence is not criminal in nature. Interestingly, however, juveniles were no more likely than adults to say they thought the police would not take the incidents seriously nor were they more likely than adults to say they were afraid of reprisals.
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