Youth Inolvement in Sexual Orientation-Motivated Bias Crimes: Utilizing the National Incident Based Reporting System

Background: Juvenile involvement in bias crimes is poorly understood, although research has consistently shown that youth under the age of 18 have made up between one quarter and one third of all bias crime offenders. In the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS; collected during 2001-2), which is a survey asking about victimization, 37.4% of 237,554 children reported experiencing harassment, and of those, three-quarters reported that bias was an element in the harassment (Heck, Russell, O’Shaughnessy, Laub, Calhoun, & Austin, 2005). More specifically, 7.5% reported being the victims of sexual orientation (or perceived sexual orientation) motivated harassment and bullying (Heck et al., 2005). However, very little is understood about the motives of youth offenders, and how their bias crime offenses may be similar to, or different, from adult offenders. Therefore, the purpose of this research project is to utilize the National Incident-based Reporting System (NIBRS) data made available through the federal government to examine bias crime cases motivated by anti-gay and anti-lesbian bias, and compare offense committed by adults to those committed by youth.

Methods: NIBRS data was used from 2009-2011, with over 4 million cases per year contained within each file. Of these, less than 1% were marked as motivated by bias, and less than 0.5% were anti-gay or anti-lesbian bias. Variables of interest include composition of offenders (in groups, acting alone), composition of victims (in groups/alone) ages of offenders and victims, the use of weapons in the crime, the use of alcohol or drugs before the commission of the crime, the presence of symbols or signs of gang activity, and other crime demographic characteristics were included. First, descriptive and bivariate statistics were utilized to examine the difference between incidents involving youth and those with adults, and those with offenders of mixed ages. Second, a discriminant function anlaysis was utilized to determine which crime characteristics best differentiated between adult offenders and youth offenders of anti-gay and anti-lesbian bias crimes.

Results: Although adults and youth share many similarities in their overall bias crime characteristics, important differneces emerged. For example, youth were more likely to be invovled in groups of offender rather than acting alone, youth-involved crimes were more likely to have signs of gang activity or gang involvement, and youths were more likely to target other youths were adults primarily targeted other adults. In addition, issues related to the sex of the youth, namely the differences between female and male youth who committed anti-gay and anti-lesbian bias crimes, emerged.

Implications: These results suggest that we need to look more deeply into the different reasons why youth may become invovled in anti-gay and anti-lesbian bias crimes. Also, improtant differences emerged between male and female youth that need to be further explored. Although the juvenile justice system currently addresses bias crimes committed by youth in the same fashion as adult bias crimes, namely, utilizing a sentence enhancement to add time to youths' sentences, more thought regarding appropriate prevention and intervention need to be considered in light of these findings.