NCJ Number
118818
Journal
Journal of Family Violence Volume: 3 Issue: 4 Dated: (1988) Pages: 327-338
Date Published
1988
Length
12 pages
Annotation
Complimenting recent research in social psychology and social geography, the present study tested whether general environmental conditions such as day of the week, season of the year, and thermal stress were significant predictors of the daily incidence of assaults on children, and whether victim characteristics, sites of incidents, and types of assaults on children varied with levels of neighborhood socioeconomic status.
Abstract
About 1614 incidents involving children 18 and under were abstracted from a data base of 9,994 aggravated assaults drawn from the files of the Dallas, Texas Police Department, covering a twenty month period from March 1980 through October 1981. Analysis indicated that general environmental indicators were significantly related to daily frequencies of assaults on children. Further, neighborhood socioeconomic status was significantly associated with children's race, sites of assault on children, and types of assault. Only 11 percent of the assaults studied were classified as "abuse". The dominant modes of assault involved firearms and knives. The analysis revealed the qualitative and quantitative variation of assault based on environmental factors. Tables and 14 references. (Author abstract modified)