Age, Marital Status, and Risk of Sexual Victimization: Similarities and Differences Across Victim-Offender Relationships.

By now, age and marital status are well-established correlates of criminal victimization, including adult women's sexual victimization. National crime statistics, as well as a large body of scholarly literature, have specified that younger women and unmarried women are at comparatively higher risk of sexual victimization than older women and married women. Few studies, however, have examined the relationship between age, marital status, and risk of victimization across diverse situational contexts of sexual victimization. The current study used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to examine whether the relationship between age, marital status, and risk of sexual victimization varied across victimization experiences involving three victim-offender relationships: stranger, acquaintance, and intimate partner. Results indicate both similarities and differences in the relationship between age, marital status, and risk of victimization across these three situational contexts of victimization. As expected, age was a significant predictor of victimization in all models; however, younger women's increased risk of victimization was far more pronounced for acquaintance and intimate partner victimization experiences as compared with stranger experiences. Also, consistent with prior research, unmarried women were at higher risk of victimization in all models; however, within unmarried status categories, separated women were at highest risk of both intimate partner and acquaintance victimization experiences as compared with never married or divorced women.