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Crime rates are measured in many ways. In large national studies, typically, the rate is the number of offenses per 100,000 people in the population and measured by police arrests or some other official criminal legal system (CLS) response. The most popular data sets used to assess crime rates in the United States are the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), yearly arrests reported by police departments across the country, which is gradually being replaced by the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). (The most recent statistics are accessible through the Bureau of Justice Statistics website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/.) The biggest shortcoming of UCR and NIBRS is they do not include crimes unknown and unreported to the police. NIBRS is preferable to the UCR in that it (1) includes more crimes (e.g., NIBRS includes domestic violence and UCR does not); (2) measures race/ethnicity far better; (3) provides far more detail about the crime incident, the victims and offenders (and how they are related to each other), victim injury, and property loss; and unlike UCR, (4) includes more arrest and clearance information (Pattavina, Carkin, & Tracy, 2017). However, NIBRS is not nationally representative data yet; currently it reports from around 7,000 law enforcement agencies covering around a third of the U.S. population in 36 states (A. Cooper, personal communication, July 10, 2019; Gavrilova, 2019).

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Figure 4.1 ● Assessing the Gender Gap in Offending Rates

Note: For gender-related offenses, when the men/boys have the higher rate the offense is male-gender-related, and when the women/girls have the higher rate the offense is female-gender-related.

But given that most crimes are never reported to the police, particularly those where victims feel stigmatized, which is most gender-based abuses, victimization surveys are typically preferable to UCR or NIBRS. In the United States this is primarily the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS, once called the National Crime Survey [NCS]), a survey of representative households from across the country collected by the federal government. Finally, some studies also use self-reported offending, which again, is more likely to reflect most crime rates. Also, self-reported offending is often compared with official records, and if matched by the individuals in both (self-report and offending), it is an ideal way to determine sexism, racism, and so on, in who is held more accountable for offending by the CLS. These victim or offender self-report measures of crime rates include distributing written or computer surveys and conducting one-on-one phone or in-person interviews. Clearly, if conducted repeatedly (such as the NCVS, UCR, NIBRS)—they can be used to examine changes over time.