4
asked to describe what happened to them in an open-ended format. Because the primary purpose
of these narrative responses is for verification by NCVS analysts that incidents are appropriately
classified, such responses have rarely been analyzed for their content, nor is the information
included as part of the NCVS data set made available for public access (see www.icpsr.umich.edu).
Moreover, published studies using NCVS narrative data appear to be limited to three previous
projects (Dodge and Lentzner 1984; BJS 1980; Garofalo et al. 1987). Thus, my proposed project
will be one of only a handful of studies to ever comprehensively examine NCVS narratives for
their descriptive content, and will be the first to specifically analyze narratives pertaining to sexual
victimization. Utilizing this largely untapped data from the NCVS, a large nationally
representative sample, will enable a rare glimpse into the cognitive processes of victimization,
while at the same time providing a large enough representative sample to make findings
generalizable to the US population.
A particularly important objective of this study, and the primary focus of this paper, is to
examine the many incidents reported to the NCVS that are designated as non-classifying. An
exploration of NCVS “raw data” reveals that approximately 24% of all sexual victimization
incidents reported are disqualified from the final NCVS estimates of rape/sexual assault because
they do not fulfill NCVS’ criteria for classification as a serious sexual crime. Such non-
classifying incidents, while not criminally deviant, represent a disturbingly large number of
incidents that collectively reveal a climate where unwanted touching, groping and verbal
harassment by both strangers and acquaintances are rather commonplace. Because most studies,
including the NCVS, have tended to concentrate on measuring more serious crimes (i.e., rape and
sexual assault), less-serious sexual victimization incidents have remained largely unexamined.
Indeed, while there have been several studies examining why victims fail to recognize rape
Convention