Doing Things Differently: Exploring Drugging Victims’ Behavioral Changes and Risk of Recurring Victimization

Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garafalo offered the “once bitten, twice shy” hypothesis, which posits that, after experiencing victimization, individuals will make changes to their lifestyles to prevent subsequent victimization. Despite the apparent logic of this hypothesis, empirical tests have provided mixed or weak support. The current study uses qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 51 drugging victims to explore the types of behavioral changes described by victims, as well as the relationship between types of behavioral changes and subsequent drugging victimization. In doing so, we begin teasing out the often subtle, yet substantively meaningful, effects of different types of behavioral changes on subsequent drugging victimization risk. Alongside contributing to the emerging body of drugging research, our findings have implications for the refinement of measures designed to empirically test the “once bitten, twice shy” hypothesis.