Erica L. Smith, BJS Statistician, Jessica Stroop, former BJS Statistician

December 11, 2019    NCJ 253042

This report, the third in a series that began in 2008-2009, presents estimates of youth-on-youth sexual victimization and staff sexual misconduct in juvenile facilities, as reported by youth. The report includes the prevalence rate of sexual victimization, type of incident, and national, state, and facility-level estimates. Findings are based on data from the National Survey of Youth in Custody, which was conducted between March and December of 2018. This report meets the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-79) requirement for the Bureau of Justice Statistics to rank facilities according to the prevalence of sexual victimization.

Highlights:

• The overall rate of sexual victimization reported by youth declined from 9.5% in 2012 to 7.1% in 2018.
• In 2018, 5.8% of youth reported sexual misconduct by facility staff, and an estimated 2.1% of youth reported sexual misconduct by facility staff that involved force or coercion.
• In 2018, 1.9% of youth reported sexual victimization by another youth that involved force or coercion.
• Out of 113 facilities with enough interviews to qualify for facility-level rankings, 12 were identified as high-rate and 14 as low-rate based on the prevalence of sexual victimization reported by youth.
• Among states that were eligible for state-level estimates and had at least a 50% response rate among eligible sampled youth, the rate of sexual victimization reported by youth ranged from 0.0% to 12.3%.

Part of the PREA Publications Series

Press release (Press Release 228K)
Summary (PDF 457K)
Full report (PDF 1.12M)
Data tables (Zip format 43K)

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