This study seeks to extend the theoretical explanation of victims’ crime reporting behavior to a social-structural framework by partially using Black’s Behavior of Law theory in a non-western context. Black’s theory of law postulated that police reporting varied according to five aspects of social life: stratification, morphology, culture, organization and social control. Drawing on the most recent victimization survey conducted in Taiwan, this study focuses on victim reporting of assault, robbery and larceny. Some findings replicated the expectations proposed by Black’s propositions, but others were contrary to expectations. Female robbery victims reported to the police approximately three times more than males. The plausible reason might involve the notion of relational distance taken from Black’s morphology perspective. It was also found that the severity of infraction was positively related to crime reporting. The coexistence of a strong effect of the variable ‘crime seriousness’ and the statistical significance of Black’s social dimensions might imply that Black’s theory has value in forming the broad social context of social action but is insufficient as an explanation of individual behavior.

Jessor (2008) has recently called attention to description versus explanation in cross-cultural and cross-national comparative scholarship on adolescent development, particularly, the etiology of adolescent problem behaviors. In the current study, we were interested in testing to what extent problem behavior theory replicated in samples of 10,310 adolescents from 8 distinct developmental contexts, including Asian, Eastern and Western European, North American, and Eurasian/Muslim cultures. Path analyses by country samples as well as follow-up multigroup analyses provided evidence of great similarities across cultures in the links among two protective factor domains (controls protection and support protection), three risk factor domains (models risk, opportunity risk, and vulnerability risk), and the problem behavior syndrome, operationalized by vandalism, general deviance, school misconduct, theft, and assault measures. This evidence adds to a growing body of scholarship that provides support for similarities in explanation, despite many observed differences in description.

In Taiwan, persons with severe mental illness are more vulnerable to crime victimization than the general population.

Although many repeat victimization studies have focused on describing the prevalence of the phenomenon, this study attempted to explain variations in the concentration of victimization by applying routine activities as a theoretical model. A multivariate analysis of repeat victimization based on the 2005 Taiwan criminal victimization data supported the general applicability of the routine activity model developed in Western culture for predicting repeat victimization. Findings that diverged from Western patterns included family income to assault, gender to robbery, and marital status, family income, and major activity to larceny incidents. These disparities illustrated the importance of considering the broader sociocultural context in the association between risk predictors and the concentration of criminal victimization. The contradictory results and nonsignificant variance also reflected untapped information on respondents' biological features and psychological tendencies. Future victimization research would do well to integrate measurements that are sensitive to salient sociocultural elements of the society being studied and individuals' biological and psychological traits.

The main purpose of this article is to examine the determinants that influence property crime victim reporting behavior using data collected from the 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey in Taiwan. By using a multi-stratified sampling procedure, data on 18,046 persons 12 years or older were collected through telephone interviews. We analyzed the determinants of victim reporting behavior and clarified the reasons for not reporting using five types of property crime À larceny, robbery, motorcycle theft, vehicle theft, and burglary, and constructed models to predict reporting for larceny, robbery, motorcycle theft, and burglary. We found that a very high percentage of vehicle theft was reported, approximately 94%, while larceny had the lowest reporting rate at 19.14%. Binary logistic regression analysis showed that crime incident variables were the major influences on reporting behavior for larceny, robbery, motorcycle theft, and burglary. Personal variables had a significant impact only on both larceny and robbery. Finally, environmental variables only affected motorcycle theft. In addition, the main reason for not reporting was 'minor crime, minor loss, or loss of property having been recovered,' namely, victims' subjective and objective perceptions of the level of incident severity were the dominant determinant of property victim reporting behavior.