In April 2025, the FBI released a special report on criminal victimization of children for the years 2019 through 2023. The report details the data that law enforcement agencies submitted to the FBI as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. For purposes of the study, a juvenile is defined as a person from birth up to and including 17-years old. The report gives statistics on juvenile victims of the three offenses of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, kidnapping/abduction, and aggravated assault. Details include locations of offenses, relationships with offenders, weapons, injuries, and characteristics of victims.

Since 1929, the FBI’s UCR Program has gathered and published data on crime across the United States. Federal, state, county, local, tribal, territorial, and campus law enforcement agencies collect data and submit it to the FBI’s UCR Program. Participation in the FBI’s UCR Program is mandatory for federal agencies, but it is voluntary for other agencies. However, state governments may mandate participation for agencies in their states.

Some agencies collect data using the traditional Summary Reporting System (SRS), which counts offenses using the Hierarchy Rule along with a limited amount of additional data on some types of offenses. (According to the Hierarchy Rule, agencies report only the most serious offense within a criminal incident.) The FBI is working to get all agencies to participate in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) rather than the SRS. NIBRS gathers much more comprehensive and useful data about crime, with up to 10 offenses per criminal incident plus dozens of additional details. For the years 2019 through 2023, approximately 61 percent of agencies participated in NIBRS, covering 64.7 percent of the American population. This report on child victimization is based on NIBRS data, which is more efficient for revealing trends.

Some key takeaways from the report for the years 2019 through 2023 are that:

• Of the 3,191,758 known offenses of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, kidnapping/abduction, and aggravated assault, 13 percent involved at least one juvenile victim.
• For the three types of offenses covered in the report, 58 percent of known locations were in residences/homes.
• For offenses with a known reported relationship, 82 percent of juvenile victims knew the offender.
• From participating agencies, the number of reported juvenile victims was 411,350.
• From participating agencies, the number of reported known offenders against juvenile victims for the offenses in the report was 389,510.
• Of the three offenses against juvenile victims addressed in the report, the highest percentage of victims—89.2 percent—were victims of aggravated assault. The lowest percentage of victims—1.5 percent—were victims of murder/nonnegligent manslaughter.

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