Exploring Vulnerability to Deviant Coping among Victims of Crime in Two Post-Soviet Cities Mackenzie Kushner a , Ekaterina Botchkovar b , Olena Antonaccio c and Lorine Hughes d a Department of Sociology and Criminology and Law, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA; b School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA; c Department of Sociology, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA; d School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado- Denver, Denver, CO, USA ABSTRACT This study pursues two important goals: 1) assessment of the offender-victim overlap in non-Western cultural contexts and 2) examination of complex moderating influences and mediating fac- tors that help explain the relationship between offending and vic- timization. Interview data from 700 Ukrainian and 735 Russian adults are used to assess main and interactive effects of theoretical predictors on violent and property offending. Findings reveal a moderate relationship between victimization and offending partially explained by association with deviant peers, self-control, and angry emotions. Moreover, association with deviant peers, depression, and anger appear to condition the relationship. Analyses support and clarify the victim-offender overlap, suggesting it is a universal phe- nomenon crossing national contexts and that the likelihood of a crime victim becoming an offender is influenced by individual traits, peer relationships, and contemporaneous emotional affect shaping behavioral responses to criminal victimization. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 21 February 2019 Accepted 1 December 2019 KEYWORDS victimization, offending, overlap, general strain theory Since Von Hentig (1948, pp. 444–455) showed that “the circumstance in which a victim is transformed into perpetrator” occurs more often than scholars know, criminologists have sought to understand the nature of the persistent association between victimiza- tion and offending (e.g. Jennings, Park, Tomsich, Gover, & Akers, 2011; Schreck, Stewart, & Osgood, 2008). Research has established that offenders and victims often possess the same characteristics and engage in much of the same behaviors (Berg, Stewart, Schreck, & Simons, 2012; Jennings, Higgins, Tewksbury, Gover, & Piquero, 2010, Jennings, Piquero, & Reingle, 2012; Lauritsen & Laub, 2007). Furthermore, the association between victimization and offending appears to hold across various crime types (Broidy, Daday, Crandall, Sklar, & Jost, 2006; Marcum, Higgins, Freiburger, & Ricketts, 2014; Tillyer & Wright, 2014; Van Gelder et al., 2015), age groups (Reingle & Maldonado-Molina, 2012; Reisig & Holtfreter, 2018), and gender categories (Stewart, Elifson, & Sterk, 2004; see also Ousey, Wilcox, & Fisher, 2011). The relationship has also been confirmed to exist in ß 2020 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences CONTACT Ekaterina Botchkovar E.botchkovar@northeastern.edu JUSTICE QUARTERLY https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2019.1707855