As these groups increase as a proportion of the population, the crime rate is expected to also increase. To control for this factor, researchers will commonly express crime rates in terms of units of a certain group in the population, most obviously young males, and will standardize the demographic profile of a community when tracing trends in crime rates or when drawing comparisons between different communities. This article applies the principle of standardization to crime victimization rates in seven Canadian cities using data from the Canadian Urban Victimization Survey. This analysis attributes the relatively high rates of personal victimization in Edmonton in 1981 to the higher proportion of young adults residing in the city at that time. 2 tables, 15 references. (Author abstract)