Crime Victim Data Question

Question

A student here is working with some crime data and would like to know whether, for the UCR, for detailed offences (we're just looking at sexual assault), if it is possible to distinguish between male and female respondents. That is, we only want to know how many women were sexually assaulted, specifically in 1993 and 2004. It doesn't appear that it is possible to determine this, but we wanted to be sure. We are aware that there is the VAWS and the GSS Cycles where we can tell (and in fact, we're using this data as well).

Answer

You are correct. CCJS has confirmed that it won't be possible to use the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR) to determine how many victims of sexual assaults were women between 1993 and 2004. There is some data on victims of crime in the UCR2 Incident Based Survey (a version of the UCR that was introduced in 1988 and that operates simultaneously with the UCR Aggregate version of the survey) but there weren't enough police forces responding to the UCR2 between 1993 and 2004 for it to provide the data your student needs. The data it contains for this period is from a limited number of police forces.

(On a more general note, there is an interesting description of the UCRs design in the IMDB under
http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3302&lang=en&db=IMDB&dbg=f&adm=8&dis=2)