Putting school crime into perspective: Self-reported school victimizations of high school seniors

Since the classic Safe School Study in 1977 by the National Institute of Education, there has been increasing concern with safety in schools in the United States. Media coverage since the 1960s has highlighted violence and terror. The President's Task Force on Victims of Crime in 1982 also decried ''intolerably high'' levels of violence occurring against both teachers and students. Focused upon violence, however, the full extent and context of school crime is lost and nothing is known about the property crimes and lesser personal crimes that occur In addition, little attention is given to crucial gender and race variations in school crimes, other than a superficial glance. Given the Presidential concern in particular, it is instructive to examine school victimization near the end of that decade in order to assess the accuracy of their perceptions and policy recommendations. Therefore, the present study addressed these issues utilizing log-linear analysis based upon self-reported data from a 1988 national sample of high school seniors. Three property and four personal, or violent, crimes are examined. Unsurprisingly, property crimes, not violent crimes, accounted for most school crime. Most students did not report experiences of these crimes in school, and of those who were victimized, most were victimized a single time. Fortunately, few encounters involved weapons. Only 5.1 percent were injured by an armed offender. In fact, threats not involving injury or weapons were the most common personal crime experienced in the school setting. The impact of gender and race varied depending upon the specific crime and the specific frequency level of victimization. Race was not a significant factor for petty theft, threats only, or injuries by an unarmed offender. Gender, on the other hand, was influential in all school crimes examined in this study. The bottom line is that investigation of school crime necessitates full context (i.e., inclusion of both property and personal crimes, as well as gender and-ace variations within these crimes) in order to accurately understand this social problem.