A rape victim possesses a scarce resource: information about the crime. Thus, a victim's decision to report the crime to police, to allocate that resource, becomes an economic choice. A victim cannot receive social support or legal justice without revealing such information, but doing so creates real costs-social recrimination and lost privacy-with no guarantee of offender apprehension. This article explores the economics of the reporting and chronic nonreporting of rape in the context of this information-allocation problem. The empirical analysis addresses the extent to which social-support availability and evidentiary factors influence the reporting decision. Dichotomous and multinomial logit results, obtained using National Crime Survey data on a sample of rape victims, reveal how various demographic and crime-specific factors explain the decision to report and the selection of specific reasons for not reporting. Some of these factors reflect circumstances addressable as matters of procedure or policy.
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The Southern Economic Association (SEA) was founded in 1927 to further the education of scholars and the public in economic affairs. Toward this end, the organization seeks to stimulate interest in and disseminate results of recent research in theory, policy making, business practices, and regulation. Currently, SEA has approximately 1,000 members worldwide, and more than 1,000 additional institutional subscribers to the journal. The Association holds its annual conference meetings in November, and publishes quarterly the Southern Economic Journal.
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