I'm Aaron Jacklin, and this is Explaining Crime, an independent newsletter that helps you explain crime to your audience.
[Note: Today’s special Saturday edition is the post that I should have published yesterday. Had some unexpected drama that got in the way. Apologies!]
Your First Five is a daily series (M-F) that publishes a curated selection of recent research related to crime and justice. Each post is more a tip sheet than an article and contains links to new studies (each related to a single topic) that I hope will enhance your work explaining crime. The publication schedule is in flux for the moment.
These new studies related to criminology and criminal justice were published recently by journals I monitor.
1. Examining Individual and Contextual Correlates of Victimization for Juvenile Human Trafficking in Florida, published in Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
Using this sample, we examined differences across individual, family, social, and community characteristics of youth involved in the juvenile justice system who have a history of trafficking victimization and youth without such histories.
2. Not so Simple: Examining the Gendered Nature of Intimate Partner Assault Victimizations, published in Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
We find differential effects of neighborhood structure by victim sex, especially for simple assault. Most notably, we find that neighborhood racial composition has significantly greater effects on females relative to male victims of simple IPV assault, while residential stability is protective of women more so than men.
3. Peer Victimization and Adolescent Mental Health: School-level Victimization as a Moderator, published in Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
In schools with lower levels of victimization, there was a stronger association between individual peer victimization and adolescent mental health. A potential explanation for these results might be the victimization visibility and perceived severity in different contexts.
4. Revising What We Know About Spatial Predictors of Violent Victimization: A Comprehensive Analysis of Differential Effects of Spatial Predictors of Robbery Victimization for Victims of Different Ethnic Backgrounds, published in Victims & Offenders.
The findings highlight the importance of victim race/ethnicity in predicting robbery victimization within high-risk areas, uncovering the disparate effects the same place features have on people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.
5. The Role of Childhood Violence in Adult Victimization Among Women Experiencing Homelessness in Spain, published in Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
Persons experiencing homelessness represent one of the principal manifestations of the phenomenon of social exclusion, with homeless women constituting a group in a particularly vulnerable situation. The article analyzed the experience of violence in childhood and adolescence, and its implications in terms of violence experienced as an adult, in a sample of women experiencing homelessness in Madrid (Spain) (n = 138).
I might cover some of these studies further in Understanding Crime. If one sounds interesting or important, let me know in the comments.
If you’ve seen a few Your First Five posts and are wondering: Yes, I use a template. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, these posts are intended more as tip sheets than articles. “These posts” and the directories (next coming Monday!) are the output of my research discovery system, which I’ve been working on and streamlining. That system is intended to furnish a wide variety of crime research and facilitate choices of what new research to actually report on, both for myself and for the journalists out there. I hope others will find these tip sheets interesting and useful for reasons that I haven’t even thought of.
I'd love to know if and how you've used Your First Five.