Abstract
The impact of victim SP on the outcomes in a given criminal events has rarely been examined or fully understood. This study develops a new theory of victimization, which I will refer to as the Power Advantage Theory (PAT), that holds crime victimization is completed only when there are motivated offenders who have contact to victims and possess physical or psychological power advantage over the victims. Based on PAT, this study assesses the impact of 16 types of victim self protection (SP) actions on three types of outcomes of criminal incidents: whether the incident resulted in property loss, whether it resulted in injury to the victim, and whether it resulted in serious injury. Data on 27,595 personal contact crime incidents recorded in the National Crime Victimization Survey for 1992-2001 are used to estimate multivariate models of crime outcomes with logistic regression. Results indicate that self-protection in general reduces the likelihood of property loss and injury, compared to nonresistance. A variety of mostly forceful tactics, including resistance with a gun, appear to have the strongest effects reducing the risk of injury, though some of the findings were unstable due to the small numbers of sample cases of such resistance. The appearance, in past research, of resistance contributing to injury is found to be largely attributable to confusion concerning the sequence of SP actions and injury. In crimes where both occurred, injury followed SP in only 10 percent of the incidents. Combined with the fact that injuries following resistance are almost always relatively minor, victim resistance appears to be generally a wise course of action. In two auxiliary test, it was found that victims used forceful self-protection, especially weapon use and defensive gun use, in the most adverse circumstances and that victims’ perceptions of the efficacy of SP were much more favorable than those implied by rates of actual post-SP injury although two measures were highly significantly correlated. These findings imply that actual effects of SP may be stronger than they appear to be in the previous study. Taken together, the results of three empirical tests generally support the hypotheses of PAT.
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