Juvenile Crime

People nowadays believe that crime has reached its peak among young generations. ''A recent study by Cambridge University identifies intense fears in communities across the UK about the decline in mutual respect and social cohesion, the dominance of anti-social behaviour, materialism and cult of celebrity

The historian Geoffrey Pearson quotes a 60-year-old named Charlotte Kirkman, who lamented that, “I think morals are getting much worse... There were no such girls in my time as there are now. When I was four or five and twenty my mother would have knocked me down if I had spoken improperly to her”. Kirkman was speaking in 1843, as part of an investigation into the bad behaviour of contemporary youth. Lord Ashley, speaking in the House of Commons in the same year, argued that “the morals of the children are tenfold worse than formerly”.

Past generations, then, have been just as convinced as we are that the “youth of today” were misbehaving more than ever before. Pearson has suggested that such fears about youth are a way of expressing more general uncertainties about social change and reoccur with each generation.

Notwithstanding the above, the criminal statistics – first collected systematically in Britain from around 1900 – might appear to suggest that the situation has deteriorated over the last 70 or 80 years. After a relatively stable period between 1900 and 1930, rates of juvenile crime began increasing in the 1930s. Apart from a slight decrease following the Second World War, youth crime figures continued on a consistent and dramatic upward course until the mid-1990s.

More generally, criminal statistics do not tell the whole story of youth crime. In particular, definitions of criminal behaviour change over time. One exam...

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...hreat – indeed, one study found that 71 per cent of media stories about young people were negative and a third of articles concerned the issue of crime. The consequence of this intense focus on young people’s behaviour is that they are faced with the challenge of growing up in a culture that has widespread negative perceptions of youth.

In addition to that perceptions of youth crime are not always based on personal experiences. For example, Anderson et al. (2005) reported that respondents’ actual experience of youth-related crime problems was lower than their portrayal of the extent of these problems in their local area. Hence, it was suggested that ‘perceptions of prevalence tend to outstrip direct experience of youth crime’. This phenomenon also implies that external factors (such as media reporting) have a role to play in shaping the public’s view of youth crime.