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Assessment of Recent Trends in Girls' Violence Using Diverse Longitudinal Sources: Is the Gender Gap Closing?

NCJ Number
210355
Journal
Criminology Volume: 43 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2005 Pages: 355-405
Author(s)
Darrell Steffensmeier; Jennifer Schwartz; Hua Zhong; Jeff Ackerman
Date Published
May 2005
Length
51 pages
Annotation
This study examined recent trends in girls' violence compared with that of boys, based on four sources of longitudinal data on juvenile violence.
Abstract
Three sources of longitudinal, national data on juvenile violence indicated by gender cover the period from the late 1970s to the present: arrest statistics from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), victimization reports of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and adolescent self-reports from the Monitoring the Future survey (MTF). A fourth source covers the period since 1991, i.e., self-reports from the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (NYRBS). This study includes the most recent data from each source, with a focus on assaults and, to a lesser degree, on the Violent Crime Index as measures of violence. The data analysis used augmented Dickey-Fuller methods combined with traditional descriptive analyses (e.g., plots and histograms) to determine whether there was a statistically reliable pattern in female trends in violence over time compared with male trends. This report first presents female-to-male arrest trends for violent crimes from the UCR, after which it examines trends from the NCVS, the MTF, and the NYRBS, both separately and compared to the UCR. The study found that the increase in girls' violence over the past 10 to 20 years as recorded in police arrest data from the UCR was not confirmed in unofficial longitudinal sources. Several "net-widening" policy changes have apparently increased girls' arrests for violent crimes, including expanding definitions of violence to include more minor incidents that girls are more likely to commit than boys and increasing the policing of violence between intimates in private settings. 1 table, 4 figures, and 91 references