Abstract
Studies examining citizenship, ethnicity, and victimization risk have offered mixed findings. Despite this, works have largely focused upon direct-contact victimization, and do not offer insights into how this risk may vary across these dimensions for other crimes not characterized by direct contact, such as identity theft. This lack of understanding undermines abilities to tailor policies to effectively support vulnerable persons, and may potentially elevate risk of this costly crime among marginalized groups. Given this, the study aims to examine the associations between citizenship status, ethnicity and identity theft risk. Using a sample from the 2018 National Crime Victimization Survey’s Identity Theft Supplement (n = 71,984), logistic regression analyses examined the odds of identity theft. Lacking citizenship was associated with decreased odds of identity theft victimization, as was Hispanic ethnicity. However, Hispanic noncitizens faced higher relative risk than either noncitizens or Hispanic persons individually. Noncitizens’ decreased relative risk may stem from avoidance behaviors which reduce their suitability or exposure through a lifestyle-routine activities perspective. Hispanic noncitizens’ increased risk relative to others may stem from their doubly marginalized status. Future work is needed considering avoidance behaviors and citizenship status, to more clearly understand how these factors influence relative risk of victimization.
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Notes
Importantly, the NCVS questionnaire may be administered in Spanish if requested by the respondent. Any supplemental surveys, such as the NCVS-ITS are similarly administered in the language requested by the subject (Bureau of Justice Statistics, n.d.).
Items were not disaggregated within the present analysis given limited victimization experience across individual forms of identity theft. For instance, only 0.78% of the analytic sample experienced new accounts-based identity theft victimization (n = 560).
Unfortunately, the NCVS-ITS did not delineate between other ethnic identities, thus precluding a more nuanced analysis of relative risk across the intersection of citizenship status and other ethnicities. Given this, generalization of findings is limited to a US context and to those identifying as either Hispanic or not Hispanic.
Given the nature and scope of the NCVS-ITS, several other potentially relevant factors relating to victimization risk, such as lifestyles and routine activities and self-control could not be included within the assessment. Despite this, risk and protective factors considered herein are consistent with prior works examining identity theft (Burnes et al., 2020; Reyns, 2013; Reyns & Henson, 2016), and reflect factors which may insulate or expose one to risk of identity theft.
In total, 15 persons identifying as transgender and 37 persons identifying as “none of these” were removed from the sample in this way.
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Maher, C.A. Examining the Association Between Citizenship and Ethnicity on Identity Theft Risk: Findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Am J Crim Just (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-024-09759-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-024-09759-7