NCJ Number
216947
Date Published
2005
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This chapter reviews relevant literature over the last approximately 30 years on the subject of race and sexual offending.
Abstract
The chapter begins with an analysis of the incidence of interracial and intraracial sex crimes, including historical efforts to collect and explain data on interracial compared with intraracial rape and current rates of these offenses. Attention is given to racial differences in perpetrator-victim dyads, characteristics of the offense, and rates of victim reporting. The chapter then reviews research on the influence of race on people's attitudes toward and responses to sex offenses. The review includes data from college and community samples, data based on rape vignette experiments, data based on "mock jury" studies, and criminal justice data. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the trends and implications of these data. It notes that contemporary data indicate that the majority of sex offenders are White, the majority of victims of sex crimes are White, and the most common offender-victim racial dyad is White/White. People's attitudes, however, continue to be influenced by the races of offenders and victims; and this continues to shape the criminal justice processing of rape cases. At various decision points in case processing, racial stereotypes and racism are likely to exert a subtle influence that produces discriminatory outcomes. Black women are discriminated against when their sexual victimization is minimized compared to White victims, and Black men are discriminated against when they are more vigorously pursued and receive harsher sentences than White sex offenders. 3 notes and 49 references