Research Highlight: The Victim-Offender Overlap

August 2, 2019

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Professor Mark Berg, director of the PPC’s Crime and Justice Policy Research Program and associate professor in the UI Department of Sociology, is a leading expert on the victim-offender overlap. In the past few years, he has published several articles on this topic and has presented his work to various organizations including the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has also received national support to study the victim-offender overlap from two grants funded by the National Institute of Justice. 

You can read more about these grants here:

What is the victim-offender overlap?

The victim-offender overlap refers to the strong positive association between offending and victimization. Victims and offenders are often the same people rotating between both roles rather than being different people in distinct groups. 

For reviews of the victim-offender overlap and relevant empirical evidence, read:

How stable is the victim-offender overlap?

The victim-offender overlap is one of the most durable patterns found in the criminological literature. As an example, see Berg’s article (with co-authors Taylor, Mumford, Liu, and Bohri; 2019), “Young Adult Reports of the Victim-Offender Overlap in Intimate and Nonintimate Relationships,” published in Criminal Justice and Behavior. In this article, the authors examine the victim-offender overlap among a nationally representative panel of adults (18-32). The results show a high degree of overlap between victimization and offending for verbal aggression, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. They also identify a victim-offender overlap among both intimate and nonintimate relationships. 

In some situations, however, the victim-offender overlap is less durable. For example, see the article “Does the Nature of the Victimization-Offending Association Fluctuate Over the Life Course? An Examination of Adolescence and Early Adulthood.” In this study, Berg and co-authors (Schreck, Ousey, Stewart, and Miller) examine the victim-offender overlap among 1,300 youth from early adolescence into adulthood. Their results show that the victim-offender overlap weakens as people age.

What explains the victim-offender overlap?

The victim-offender overlap has been attributed to low self-control, social bonds, honor-based attitudes, and the routine activities and peer associations of offenders. Most research, however, suggests that these processes do not fully explain the overlap. 

As an alternative explanation, Berg and Felson (2016) proposed a social psychological explanation of the offender-victim overlap that emphasizes social interactions between adversaries and the importance of interpersonal conflict (see “Why Are Offenders Victimized So Often?” in The Wiley Handbook on the Psychology of Violence). They suggest that violent offenders are more likely to become victims because of their tendency 1) to become involved in verbal disputes, and 2) to behave in ways that cause their disputes to escalate. 

Berg and co-authors (Felson, Rogers, and Krajewski; 2018) conduct a test of this explanation in their article, “Disputatiousness and the Offender-Victim Overlap,” published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. The authors used self-reported data from 503 male inmates and 220 men from the community. They find that “disputatiousness” – the tendency to become involved in verbal conflicts – partly accounts for the victim-offender overlap. 

More recently, Berg and Felson (2019) further tested this explanation using situational-level data (see “A Social Interactionist Approach to the Victim-Offender Overlap” in Journal of Quantitative Criminology). The authors examined characteristics of over 1200 verbal and violent interpersonal disputes. They found that violent actors are more likely to engage in provocative actions (e.g. insults and threats) during disputes, are less likely to engage in remedial actions (e.g. apologies), and are more likely to be intoxicated. Additionally, third parties are more likely to be present during the disputes of offenders and these third parties tend to encourage escalation. Combined, the findings indicate that the victim-offender overlap is partly due to the behaviors of offenders and third parties during disputes.