Falling victim to crime is a frightening event, with serious negative consequences for victims’ health, labour market participation, and human capital accumulation. Most existing studies on the impacts of victimisation focus on adult victims, but the group most likely to experience victimisation is youth.
Who falls victim to crime?
Aotearoa has some of the highest rates of victimisation among developed countries. 21.5% of New Zealanders report having recently been a victim of crime, which is much higher than the OECD average of 15.5%.
Victimisation disproportionately happens to young people. The graph below shows the victimisation-age profile for all victims of reported crime in New Zealand from 2014-23. Reported victims are mostly young people, with the age-distribution peaking at age 24.
A traumatic experience in one’s formative years can have long-term negative impacts on health, wellbeing, and economic outcomes. So, it is important to understand how victimisation affects young people, and whether these effects persist.
Estimating the causal effects of victimisation
Victimisation is not a random event, so we cannot simply compare the outcomes of victims and non-victims to understand the causal effects of victimisation.
In my research project, we overcame this challenge by focusing only on (reported) victims and using differences in the timing of assault to create comparable treatment and control groups. Our treatment group are young people victimised in the present and the comparison group are young people victimised sometime in the future.
These two groups look alike, on average, with the only difference being the timing of the assault. Therefore, the yet-to-be-victimised comparison group informs us about what would have happened to the young victims had they not been assaulted.
The sample is the full population of young victims (ages 0-30) who experienced a non-family-violence assault that was reported to the NZ Police. Of course, this only captures a small sample of victims and does not speak to the effects of assault on victims who did not go to the Police.
Using a stacked difference-in-differences model, we explored how assault victimisation impacts health, work, and schooling behaviours in the first 12 months after the assault.