Taking It To The Streets: A Comparative Analysis Of Violent Victimization, The Victim-Offender Overlap, And The Victim-Fear Relationship Among School And Street-Involved Youth In Toronto

Research on violent victimization among youth has received a considerable amount of academic attention in recent years; however, this research has typically been conducted separately for conventional populations of school-based youth and at-risk populations of street-involved youth. Although it is generally assumed that the rates of violent victimization are higher among the street-involved youth, to date, research has yet to undertake a comprehensive and comparative analysis of these two populations. Without this research, the presumed differences between these two populations will remain untested, and an analysis of how the mechanisms operate similarly and differently between these two populations will remain largely unexplored. This dissertation project addresses this gap in the literature by undertaking a comparative analysis of violent victimization, the victim-offender overlap, and the victim-fear relationship among a comparable sample of school-based youth and street-involved youth. In general, the findings from this dissertation reveal that the street-involved youth are violently victimized at much greater rates than the school-based youth, and these differences cannot be explained away by the social-situational factors that are more abundant among the street-involved youth. While the factors predicting the victim-offender overlap appear to follow a similar pattern for both the school and street youth, the dangerous social context of life on the streets creates an environment where violence and victimization frequently co-occur. These high rates of violent victimization do not directly translate into a higher level of fearfulness of crime, however, as the street-involved youth report being less fearful on average than do the school-based youth. These results suggest that fearlessness may be a learned adaptation among the street-involved youth to survive life on the streets.Ph.D