Introduction
To law enforcement and the public, sexual assaults, and
especially the sexual assaults of young children, are a major
social concern. Caretakers worry about such attacks when
their children are out of sight. Law enforcement, child
protective services, and legislatures work to reduce the
incidence of these crimes. However, while a few highly
publicized incidents are engraved in the public’s
consciousness, there is little empirically-based information
on these crimes. Until recently, law enforcement and
policymakers had few hard facts on which to base their
response to these crimes, their victims, and their offenders.
The only existing national data collection effort that explored
the incidence of sexual assault ignored crimes against
young victims. The National Crime Victimization Survey
(NCVS) estimated there were 197,000 incidents of forcible
rape and 110,000 incidents of other sexual assault in the
United States in 1996 involving victims ages 12 or above
(Ringel, 1997). Victims reported that a third (31%) of these
sexual assaults (or 94,000 victimizations) were reported to
law enforcement agencies. However, for 1996, the Uniform
Crime Reporting Program (UCR) estimated that there were
96,000 forcible rapes alone reported to law enforcement
agencies (FBI, 1997). The UCR does not capture reported
crime information on other sexual assaults such as forcible
sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling.
However, it can be assumed from their relative volume in the
NCVS that tens of thousands of sexual assaults other than
forcible rape came to the attention of law enforcement in
1996. The large difference between the NCVS and the UCR
estimates may reflect differences in the two data collection
methods; or, if both estimates are valid, they indicate that
many victims of sexual assault are youth under age 12.
Beyond their volume, little is known about the victims,
their offenders, and other characteristics of these crimes.
However, the UCR’s relatively new National Incident-Based
Reporting System (NIBRS) has the potential to yield detailed
descriptions of sexual assaults reported by participating law
enforcement agencies. NIBRS captures a wide range of
information on each incident of sexual assault reported to
law enforcement. This information includes demographic
information on all victims; the levels of victim injury; victims’
perceptions of offenders’ ages, gender, race, and Hispanic
ethnicity; and the victim-offender relationships. NIBRS also
collects information on all offenses involved in the incident;
the types of weapons used; the locations of the incident, the
dates and times of the incident; the demographics of
arrestees (if any); and the methods of clearance, such as
arrest or victim refusal to cooperate with the investigation.
To some, the value of the NIBRS data is limited by the small
and non-scientific sample of contributing law enforcement
agencies. From 1991 through 1996 the sample of reporting
agencies increased; however, even the reporting agencies
in the 1996 sample were responsible for less than 10% of
the U.S. population. While there is no way to assess the
national representativeness of the sample, the number of
sexual assault victimizations in the NIBRS sample is very
large. Therefore, accepting the inherent qualifications
associated with any analysis of NIBRS data, the sheer
number of reports and the detailed information available on
each crime provides researchers and policymakers with a
unique opportunity to study the sexual assaults of young
children.
The data
The 1991 through 1996 NIBRS master files contain reports
from law enforcement agencies in 12 States: Alabama,
Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan,
North Dakota, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.
These reports were scanned to identify incidents of sexual
assault. The FBI’s offense coding structure classifies sexual
assault into four separate offense categories. From most to
least serious, these crimes are forcible rape, forcible
sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling.
If more than one of these offenses occurred, the most
severe sexual charge was used to classify the sexual
assault in the incident.
To study the sexual assault of young children, two research
bases (differing by unit of count) were extracted from the
1991 through 1996 NIBRS master files. One base summa-
rized the information for each of the 60,991 victims of sexual
assault, the incident characteristics, and (where available)
information on their offender(s). The second base compiled
information for each of the 57,762 victim-identified offenders
in sexual assault incidents, their victims, and related incident
characteristics.
Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics
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