Understanding Victims’ Use of Formal Services After Violence A Needs-Barriers Framework
Open Access
- Author:
- Hullenaar, Keith
- Graduate Program:
- Criminology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 19, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Eric P Baumer, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Eric P Baumer, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Thomas Anthony Loughran, IV, Committee Member
David M Ramey, Committee Member
Jocelyn C Anderson, Outside Member
Thomas Anthony Loughran, IV, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- violence
helpseeking
victimization
police reporting
healthcare use
victim service agency - Abstract:
- Violence has detrimental and long-lasting effects on victims’ physical health, emotional well-being, and social relationships. Formal services, such as law enforcement, health services, and victim service agencies, provide victims a means to mitigate these harms, but not all victims use them. This dissertation seeks to understand and predict these help-seeking outcomes. Building on the theoretical principles of rational choice theory, I offer a needs-barriers framework to explain why victims may use (or avoid) formal services after a crime. This framework rests on two parsimonious assumptions: (1) Victims use a formal service when they perceive that it can satisfy one or more of their physiological, safety-related, psychological, or social needs and (2) Perceived physical, psychological, and social barriers serve as disincentives for victims to use formal services. I argue that this approach provides insight into how the sequelae of violence (e.g., physical, emotional, social harms) and the situational factors of victimization (e.g., victim-offender relationship and sexual violence) interact to influence whether and how victims utilize formal services after a crime. Using violent victimization data collected by the National Crime Victimization Survey (2008-2018), this dissertation provides two studies that examined the scope of violence harms and how these harms, and certain situational factors of violence, influence victims’ formal help-seeking outcomes. The first study examines the short- and long-term physical, emotional, and social harms of violent victimization. The findings suggest that injury severity and victim-offender relationship are key risk factors of harm, but in unique ways. Victims who reported a greater degree of injury and a closer relationship with their offender had worse physical, emotional, and social outcomes. These victims were also more likely to report long-term physical and psychological symptoms months after the crime occurred. However, the link between injury severity and these other sequelae of violence depended on the victim-offender relationship. Specifically, the degree of injury had a significantly weaker effect on the emotional, social, and long-term consequences of victimization when the attacker was a family/intimate partner than when the offender was a stranger. The second study investigates violence victims’ use of formal services after the crime, including police, medical, and victim services. Overall, victims used formal services in roughly half of the violent victimizations, with police services being the most common (94% of incidents involving a formal service). Consistent with the needs-barriers framework, the physical, emotional, and social harms of violence were strong and consistent predictors of whether violence victims reported to the police, sought medical care, or contacted victim service agencies after the crime. However, the results regarding victim-offender relationship were mixed. Victims were generally most likely to use formal services when the offender was a family member/intimate partner or a stranger instead of an acquaintance. In analyses of victims’ use of follow-up emotional care months after the crime, victims were most likely to use formal services when the offender was a family member/intimate partner. Similar to the previous study, the link between the harms of violence and victims’ use of formal services was partly conditioned by the victim-offender relationship. Injury severity and social distress had a weaker relationship to victims’ use of formal services when the offender was a family member/intimate partner than when the offender was a stranger. However, in analyses of victims’ use of follow-up care, this interaction was not significant. Violence victims’ formal help-seeking outcomes result from a complex interplay between their needs for formal services and the barriers they face in accessing them. A needs-barriers framework lends insight into the unique ways commonly studied measures of violence—e.g., injury severity and victim-offender relationship—influence victims’ help-seeking outcomes.