Applying target congruence theory to victimization risk of students from multicultural backgrounds: A comparison of South Korean, North Korean, and other multicultural family adolescents

The objective of this study was to apply Target Congruence Theory (TCT) to explore the relationship between ethnicity and victimization in the context of South Korea. Specifically, this study used more than 235,000 students from the Korean Youth Risk Behavior Web-Based Survey (KYRBS) to explore the victimization experiences of multicultural children through the lenses of target vulnerability, target gratifiablity, and target antagonism. Results from multivariate modeling show that indicators of target congruence and deviant lifestyles were associated with the risk of violent victimization. Consistent with propositions of TCT, students from North Korean families were over eleven times more likely to report that they had experienced serious victimization, even after controlling for opportunity-related variables than students from South Korean families. Similarly, “other” multicultural family adolescents were over five times more likely to report a violent victimization experience than South Korean family adolescents. Policy implications are discussed.