Relationship violence is a common problem faced by adolescents in the United States. In general, adolescents are at higher risk for relationship victimization than adults (Silverman, Raj, Mucci, & Hathaway, 2001), and females between the ages of 16 and 24 years are at the highest risk of relationship victimization (Rennison, 2001). This study uses data from the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance (YRBSS) System (or referred to as Youth Risk Behavior Survey [YRBS]; N = 11,781) of adolescents between the ages of 14 and 17 years to estimate two logistic regression models on the association between relationship violence and suicidal behaviors controlling for variables such as sexual assault and drug use. The findings indicated that victimized adolescents are at higher risk for planning and/or attempting suicide compared to nonvictimized adolescents. Implications for research and practice are explored.

By now, age and marital status are well-established correlates of criminal victimization, including adult women's sexual victimization. National crime statistics, as well as a large body of scholarly literature, have specified that younger women and unmarried women are at comparatively higher risk of sexual victimization than older women and married women. Few studies, however, have examined the relationship between age, marital status, and risk of victimization across diverse situational contexts of sexual victimization. The current study used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to examine whether the relationship between age, marital status, and risk of sexual victimization varied across victimization experiences involving three victim-offender relationships: stranger, acquaintance, and intimate partner. Results indicate both similarities and differences in the relationship between age, marital status, and risk of victimization across these three situational contexts of victimization. As expected, age was a significant predictor of victimization in all models; however, younger women's increased risk of victimization was far more pronounced for acquaintance and intimate partner victimization experiences as compared with stranger experiences. Also, consistent with prior research, unmarried women were at higher risk of victimization in all models; however, within unmarried status categories, separated women were at highest risk of both intimate partner and acquaintance victimization experiences as compared with never married or divorced women.

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Rape and other forms of sexual violence have often been prevalent in times of war. For centuries, the rape and sexual enslavement of civilians by soldiers were widely accepted and even legitimized as “the spoils of war.” Sexual violence has also been used strategically as a means to punish and humiliate enemies and systematically destroy, in whole or in part, groups of people based on their ethnic, cultural, or religious affiliations. It was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that international organizations began to classify wartime sexual violence as a human rights violation and a war crime. The first international prosecutions for rape in wartime occurred in the 1990s for atrocities perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Nevertheless, sexual violence in conflict zones continues to be a serious global security problem in the modern world, and the international community is still working to address this phenomenon in a better way.

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