Research on the media's portrayal of Asian American crime victims has largely entailed content analyses of specific high-profile cases, partly because Asian Americans have been largely ignored in the media. The current study examines national news coverage (2010–2021) of both specific anti-Asian hate crime incidents as well as articles that discuss the rise in hate crime against the Asian American community. We also include anti-Hispanic hate crime articles over the same time period as a comparison group. In doing so, we examine the extent of coverage, portrayals of victims and perpetrators, including stereotypes of Asian Americans, and how the incidents are situated in a larger context of violence against racial minorities. While there were similarities between the groups in the media narratives, such as the offender's race rarely being mentioned, there were notable differences as well. For example, articles on Asian Americans were more likely to portray hate crime as a new phenomenon, but also more likely to include quotes from victims and/or their families. The findings have implications for the media's role in shaping the social consequences of pandemics.

Although the use of self-defense is common in incidents of intimate partner violence (IPV), correlates of self-protective behaviors in IPV are less known. Furthermore, while research has examined the unintended consequence of dual arrest as a result of using self-defense in IPV incidents, research has not examined whether self-defense is associated with the likelihood of reporting the victimization to the police. The purpose of this study is to first examine the racial differences in the use of self-defense in incidents of IPV. Second, this study examines the relationship between the use of physical self-defense and formal help-seeking (i.e., calling the police) and whether those relationships vary across race/ethnicity for White, Black, and Hispanic women. Using a large nationally representative sample of IPV incidents in the United States, this study found that incidents with Black female victims were more likely to feature physical self-defense compared to incidents with White female victims. Furthermore, incidents with Black female victims were more likely to be reported to the police. There was a positive relationship between physical self-defense and reporting to the police for Black women and an inverse relationship between physical self-defense and reporting to the police for Hispanic women.

Many crime victims do not report their victimization and rates of reporting are disparate across crime types. While research has established victims are least likely to report sexual assault, less known is whether the crime discounting process affects reporting rates and whether this process differs by crime type. This paper thus examines reporting for robbery, sexual assault, and physical assault incidents, particularly exploring victims who indicated their incident was “not a crime.” Using the National Crime Victimization Survey (n = 15,012) and a series of logistic regressions, this study found that, holding a number of incident-level correlates constant, crime type was the most salient predictor of reporting to police and nonreporting because the incident was “not a crime.”

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