A Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice doctoral student has earned top honors for her research from the American Society of Criminology.
Sarah Wouters, a fourth-year doctoral student from Port St. Lucie, Florida, earned Graduate Student Paper of the Year from the ASC’s Division of Victimology for her research paper, ‘Seeking Help After Hate: Informal Help-Seeking Among Bias and Non-Bias Crime Victims.’
Wouters will be recognized at the ASC’s annual meeting in Washington D.C. next month.
Among the findings in her paper, published in Justice Quarterly, Wouters found that victims of hate crimes are nearly 60% less likely to seek help from police than to seek no help at all when compared to non-hate crime victims.
“We found that it is very likely to be because hate crime victims reported greater concerns about police ineffectiveness, mistreatment or dismissal of their victimhood than non-hate crime victims in this sample,” Wouters said.
Conversely, Wouters’ study showed that hate -crime victims are more likely to seek out informal help, such as mental health professionals, medical providers, or family and friends.
Overall, regardless of the victimization experience, Wouters’ study showed low usage of police and non-police resources for victims.
“Across the board, we see that many victims handle things on their own,” she said. “Anticipated negative reactions from the criminal justice system are likely part of that. So, victims may just be avoiding potentially bad experiences altogether.”
Wouters thanked Associate Professor Brendan Lantz for his early guidance and “getting this paper off the ground,” and Associate Professor Marin Wenger, for her help as co-author and steering the paper through the publication process.
“It is a very exciting honor and it is awesome to see how far I’ve come as a researcher,” Wouters said. “It’s also amazing to have a spotlight cast on serious issues like hate crime victimization which receives relatively less attention within our discipline. So, I'm really thankful for this recognition.”
For more information, visit the Hate Crime Research and Policy Institute.