“Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2008-09”

The report provides estimates of sexual victimization reported by youth in juvenile facilities by type of activity, including youth-on-youth sexual contact, staff sexual misconduct and level of coercion. It estimates that 12 percent of adjudicated youth in state-operated and local or privately-operated juvenile facilities reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another youth or facility staff member. About 4.3 percent of youth reported having sex or sexual contact with staff as a result of force, and 6.4 percent of youth reported sexual contact with staff without any force, threat, or other explicit form of coercion.

The report includes an analysis of the experience of sexual victimization, characteristics of youth most at risk to victimization, the time and location of incidents, characteristics of perpetrators and the nature of the injuries.

The survey was mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Data is derived from the 2008-09 National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC), conducted in 195 juvenile confinement facilities between June 2008 and April 2009 among a sample of over 9,000 adjudicated youth.

Read the report.