The risk of physical assault is higher for men

The risk of physical assault is higher for men, for those who have a job and for people residing in urban areas or in a metropolis. This risk decreases slightly as years of education and income increase, that is, more educated or richer people are less likely to be assaulted. On the other hand, the effect is opposite for theft and attempted theft or robbery. This result has also been reported by Gianini et al. (1999), Gomes and Paz (2008), Zaluar (2009), Justus et al. (2015), for example, and may indicate that economic reasons are not the most important determinants for physical assault. Furthermore, crime against persons has little economic motivation for two main reasons: (i) 73.4% of assaults occur at one\'s home or in educational establishments and (ii) 56.6% of them are committed by people who were well known by the victim (friends and acquaintances, spouses, former spouses, or relatives). It can therefore be deduced that this type of crime is motivated by misunderstandings or by passion and that they nitric oxide synthase inhibitors are not particularly related to economic conditions or home security. The results in Fig. 2 suggest that the relationship between age and victimization has an inverted U-shape. Children and elderly people tend to be less risk-prone; people at intermediate ages are in turn more exposed to any of the types of crime analyzed here. Fig. 3 and Table A.2 show that the age–victimization risk curve reaches its peak at different ages for each type of crime. The maximum age risk for robbery occurs at the age of 38; for physical assault, at the age of 27; and for theft, at the age of 58. The result for assault corroborates the literature: young people are more daring and therefore take more risks. As for theft, the estimated age may reflect the fragility and vulnerability of elderly people, as well as the fact that they have more goods than young people. On the other hand, the relationship between income and victimization risk is statistically significant in all the estimated models. At means of regressors, increased income raises the victimization risk by 0.4 p.p. However, this effect is not the same for all income levels. As a result, for people with a monthly income of less than approximately 15.4 thousand reals, any marginal increase in income will increase the risk of victimization (see Fig. 4). For those who earn more, increases in income reduce the risk because they have the means to invest more in goods that ensure greater security. This figure means that, considering income distribution in Brazil, an increase in income leads to a lower risk of victimization for less than 1% of all Brazilians. Considering each type of crime separately, Fig. 5 and the coefficients in Table A.1 show that: (i) the income–victimization risk curve is nonlinear (inverted U) for theft and for attempted theft and robbery and that the risk of victimization reaches its peak at income levels of 18.7 and 8.4 thousand reals, respectively; and (ii) for the crimes of physical assault and robbery, this relationship is negative. This piece of evidence (except for robbery) is consistent with the results found in Gomes and Paz (2008) and Justus and Kassouf (2013) with data for municipalities located in the state of São Paulo and for the city of São Paulo. The higher the income of a potential victim, the greater his or her attractiveness to crime and, on the other hand, the greater the willingness of the individual to spend more in ensuring his or her own security. The combination of these two factors leads the risk of victimization to be higher for people with intermediate levels of income. We also investigated the relationship between the use of domestic security items and level of income for the Brazilian population to check the hypothesis that higher-income households invest more in security than the rest. This can be clearly seen in Fig. 6, which shows that higher-income Brazilian households are fitted with more security items, while less than half of poorer households use a security device of some kind and almost 100% of the homes of the rich have extra locks and bolts, electrified fences and walls.