University of New Hampshire Scholars\u27 Repository
Abstract
The National Juvenile Online Victimization Study (N-JOV Study) was conducted by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, under grants from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice. The N-JOV study collected information from a national sample of law enforcement agencies about the characteristics of Internet sex crimes against minors and the numbers of arrests for these crimes during a one-year period. The goals of our methodology were to 1) design a representative national sample of law enforcement agencies that would give us an overall picture of these crimes in the U.S., 2) understand how these cases emerged and were handled in a diverse group of agencies, and 3) get detailed data about the characteristics of these crimes from well-informed, reliable sources. We used a two-phase process to collect data from a national sample of local, county, state and federal law enforcement agencies. In Phase 1, we sent a mail survey to a national sample of law enforcement agencies asking if they had made arrests in Internet-related child pornography or sexual exploitation cases between July 1, 2000 and June 30, 2001. In Phase 2, we conducted telephone interviews with law enforcement investigators about a sample of the cases reported in the mail survey. The final data set, weighted to account for sampling procedures and other factors, includes data from 612 completed interviews
