Victim-Offender Relationship and the Emotional, Social, and Physical Consequences of Violent Victimization.

Introduction: Research is equivocal about how the social relationship between victims and offenders is linked to the emotional, social, and physical consequences of violence. This study examines the association of victim-offender relationship with the adverse outcomes reported by injured and uninjured victims of violence.

Methods: The study analyzed 16,723 violent victimizations recorded by the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2008 to 2018. Multivariable quasi-Poisson models estimated the associations between the victim-offender relationship and victims' emotional distress, social distress, and physical and emotional symptoms. These models also estimated a statistical interaction between victim-offender relationship and violent injury to examine how this association differed for injured and uninjured victims. The analyses occurred during 2020 and 2021.

Results: Uninjured victims were more likely to report emotional distress (risk ratio=1.41, 95% CI=1.33, 1.50), social distress (risk ratio=3.12, 95% CI=2.78, 3.51), more physical symptoms (symptom frequency ratio=1.68, 95% CI=1.51, 1.87), and more emotional symptoms (symptom frequency ratio=1.13, 95% CI=1.08, 1.18) in family member/intimate partner violence than in stranger violence. Victims also reported worse outcomes after acquaintance violence than after stranger violence. For injured victims, these differences narrowed-but were still significant-in emotional and social distress models. However, the number of emotional and physical symptoms reported by injured victims did not significantly vary across victim-offender relationships.

Conclusions: Relational closeness between victims and offenders is a risk factor for adverse outcomes after violent victimization, and it is more strongly associated with these outcomes for uninjured victims than for injured victims.