Gender Invariance Testing of a Fear of Victimization Scale

Gender differences among fear of victimization have been well-established such that women are generally more afraid of all types of victimization than men. This is paradoxical given that women historically have been less likely to be victimized than men with few exceptions (i.e., interpersonal violence crimes, such as sexual assault and domestic/dating violence). This difference is supported by the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data, although data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) has more recently shown that the difference between male and female violent victimization is statistically nonsignificant (Thompson & Tapp, 2022). The ‘shadow of sexual assault’ hypothesis suggests that women’s heightened fear is due to their increased likelihood for sexual victimization. While there is empirical support for this hypothesis, there is a gap in knowledge pertaining to whether fear of victimization is due to a gendered effect or if the scales being used to measure fear are non-invariant. In other words, are the questions about fear of victimization viewed the same way by both men and women? Using a fear of victimization scale from a dataset that surveyed a jail sample, invariance testing was conducted to determine if the scale would reveal invariance between men and women. Findings show that the fear of victimization scale from this survey, once fear of sexually-motivated crimes was removed, is appropriate for continued use, at least in determining differences between males and females. Implications of these findings are discussed along with directions for future research.