Exploring adolescents’ willingness to report experienced victimization

Reporting crime is important for individuals and society in several ways, such as asserting victims’ rights, informing law enforcement, preventing further crimes, and recording trends. In recent years, however, adolescents in Germany have shown a reduced reporting rate. The present study examined the processes behind adolescents’ decisions to report crime. Three categories of factors identified as relevant in recent studies (perception of damage, social context factors, and individual victim characteristics) were analyzed as part of a secondary analysis of a subsample from a student survey conducted in Germany in 2022 by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (n = 1,612). Conditional inference forests were used to identify important predictor variables in the context of reporting behavior. To analyze the direction of effects and develop a model that is easier to interpret and generalize from, an additional logistic regression analysis was conducted with the identified relevant variables. The results indicate that the willingness to report a crime was predominantly increased by the extent of physical damage, which was operationalized by the type of physical treatment received after the victimization. Other relevant variables were the type of offense, subjectively perceived damage, and known perpetrator.