The reporting and underreporting of rape.

• Author: Allen, W. David

1. Introduction

   The underreporting of rape represents one of the most persistent patterns in law enforcement. The U.S. Department of Justice estimated that for the period 1994-1995 only about one-third of rape victims reported the crime to police, making rape the most underreported of all violent crimes. (1) From the perspective of the economic model of crime, underreporting of any crime weakens a vital link between crime and punishment demonstrated in the seminal models of Becker (1968) and Ehrlich (1973). Reporting by victims reinforces the probability of detection and the expected cost of illegal activity; these elements are critical to establishing a disincentive for individuals to commit crime. Underreporting reduces the probability of detection because it prevents law-enforcement officials from gaining information valuable, or even essential, in the apprehension of offenders. Ultimately, less apprehension means less restitution for victims. Reporting by individuals also yields restitutional benefits for society as a whole and provides valuable information about the types and frequency of crimes that actually occur, which is important for the formation of efficient crime policy.

   To understand underreporting, we must understand reporting. A rape victim possesses a scarce resource: information about the crime. Thus, the decision to report, to allocate that information resource, is an economic decision. A victim who desires social support or legal justice has an incentive to tell others, including police, about the crime; a victim obtains neither by remaining silent. But rape victims who come forward incur real and unique costs. They lose their anonymity, risk retribution by the offender and stigmatization by people they know, and often must participate in an arduous, sometimes openly hostile, legal process. These costs become particularly egregious for victims of rape, given the significant psychological trauma they often experience from the crime itself.

   On the other side, police investigators interested in apprehending rapists value such information but cannot obtain it without significant cost. Rape investigation, like any criminal investigation, requires an allocation of scarce police resources away from other enforcement activity and, of course, carries no guarantee of successful apprehension. (2) Because a rape victim tends to be the best and often the only witness to the crime other than the offender, investigators rely heavily on victims revealing information to them. But how investigators actually respond when presented with rape cases may well influence the extent to which current or future victims regard reporting as ultimately worth the cost. In an environment where rape victims and investigators interact, chronic underreporting of rape implies that information revelation by victims systematically contributes insufficient benefits, incurs excessive costs, or does both. The essential objective of this paper is to clarify the nature of those benefits and costs and how they influence the reporting decision.

   Section 2 discusses in greater detail the hypothetical victim's fundamental information-allocation problem, highlighting the essential commodities that become valuable (provide utility) to a rape victim facing a reporting decision. This discussion considers the conditions under which a victim will have incentive to report...