Predictors of Receiving Medical Attention Among Rape and Assault Victims By Using National Sample

Background/Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the associations among police involvement, offender relationship and receiving of medical care in National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The current study analysis of NCVS between 1992- 2015 among rape and sexually assaulted victims between 18 to 24 years old and focuses on medical attention of victims.

According to National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (2011) approximately 19.3 % of U.S women and 1.7 % of U.S men have experienced rape during their lifetimes (Breiding, et. al, 2011). Medical attention for victims of rape and sexual assault is important to prevent and treat rape-related diseases and injuries (Zinzow, et al., 2012). Therefore, this study provides to understand how many people intend to receive medical care and the correlation between police involvement, offender relationship and receiving medical care within sexual victims. Thus, this study examines two interrelated research questions: (a) does reporting police correlate to receive medical care?  (b) Is there a relationship between receiving medical care and offender relationship among college rape and sexual assaulted victims?

Method: Data and sample:  NCVS collects information from victims of nonfatal violent and property crimes, reported and not reported to the police, against persons’ age 12 or older from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2015). The current study focuses specifically on a subsample of the NCVS (1992-2015)—18 to 24 years old’s who reported being victims of rape or sexually assault (N=288).

Measures: The dependent variable—whether or not an individual received medical attention—was constructed from the question: “Were you injured to the extent that you received any medical care, including self-treatment?”.

Police involvement is a dichotomous measure as to whether “police [were] informed or … found out about this incident in any way?” Offender relationship was constructed as a categorical measure (i.e., unknown, relative, non-relative) from the question “How did you know the offender?”. Race and gender were included as covariates in multivariate analyses.

Logistic regressions were conducted to examine the association between the independent variables (i.e., police involvement and offender relationship) and the outcome, medical attention.

Results: Within this sample (N=288), victimization of 33.0% (n=95) of participants was reported police. Nearly three-fourth of victims (n=196) knew the offenders and  nearly one-third of victims (n=90) reported receiving medical care, while the remaining two-thirds (n=198) did not receive care.

Within logistic regression analyses, police involvement predicted receipt of medical attention ( p<0.05), where victims who reported to police had five times higher odds of receiving medical attention than victims who did not report to police. No other relationships were significant in this study.

Conclusion and Implication: Study findings suggest that police reporting can be a protective factor to receiving medical attention.  Thus, we need to ensure to create training programs for police to understand issues of sexual violence and increase comfort of victims to encourage police reporting as a way to increase medical attention.