« Previous | Contents | Next »
Listen
Measurement of the Extent of Youth Crime
in Scotland
2 Overview
Introduction
2.1 The principal aim of this study is to generate an
estimate of the extent of youth crime in Scotland as well
as to provide an overview of the perceptions and fears of
youth crime and anti-social behaviour in Scotland. As with
any attempt to measure and assess social phenomena, it is
worth beginning by reviewing briefly the conceptual and
technical issues that underpin them.
Measuring youth crime
Problems of definition
2.2 As anyone whose home has been broken into or car has
been stolen will testify, the experience of victimisation
is real in its effects. That does not mean, however, that
'crime' itself is a straightforward or given empirical
category. Although some actions may be easier to define as
criminal than others, crime is about both action and
reaction. 'Criminal' behaviours are only given their
meaning by the way in which, individually and collectively,
we respond to them and these responses can vary greatly.
For example, at what point do we consider a fight between
two young people to involve a criminal act. If a ten
year-old hits another ten year-old, we might decide that,
though wrong, such behaviours are part and parcel of
'normal' childhood. If, however, the children were both
fifteen, or the assailant was an adult, we would be likely
to consider it rather differently. Similarly, behaviour
that might be construed as highly threatening by one person
might pass unnoticed by another.
2.3 The aim here is not to embark on a lengthy
theoretical deconstruction of the concept of crime, but
simply to remind ourselves that its measurement (whether in
general or specifically in relation to young people) is not
a purely technical exercise. There is no definitive or
'real' level of crime or youth crime. That is not the same
as saying that real things do not happen to real people,
only that competing versions of that crime reality can be
painted using different kinds of statistics. Each may tell
us something valuable about the 'problem of youth crime',
but their starting point and underlying assumptions need to
be understood. Consequently, the estimates of youth crime
presented in this report need to be understood as precisely
that - estimates - that should be seen more as a starting
point for discussion and debate than as a neat or
definitive summary of the 'facts and figures' of youth
crime.
Technical issues
2.4 Various kinds of statistics are available about
(youth) crime and criminal justice in Scotland. Some of
these, such as the police recorded crime statistics, are
counts of actions or incidents; others, such as prisons
data, record information about cases or people, or, like
the Scottish Crime Survey, are based on surveys of the
general public and so provide population prevalence or
incidence figures. All of these sources tell us something
about the character of the youth crime problem in Scotland.
If, however, we are interested in the specific question of
how much crime is committed by young people, then
we can narrow our focus considerably. Half a century ago,
an American criminologist offered the following observation
on the utility of various forms of criminal statistics.
"It may be said that the value of a crime rate for
index purposes is in inverse ratio to the procedural
distance between the commission of a crime and the
recording of it as a statistical unit. An index based
on crimes reported to or known to the police is
superior to others, and an index based on the
statistics of penal treatment, particularly prison
statistics, is the poorest."1
2.5 In general, this still holds true. If we are
interested in how much crime is committed by young people
in Scotland, we need to look for the shortest procedural
distance between the act itself and its recording. This
means that our starting point should be the police recorded
crime statistics, rather than data held by the Scottish
Courts, the Scottish Prison Service or the Children's
Reporter; all of which are subject to very significant
attrition and organisational filtering.
2.6 Figure 2.1 illustrates the processes of filtering
and attrition that occur in the movement from commission of
a criminal act, through detection, reporting, recording and
processing by the criminal justice system. (The example
shown involves a report to the Procurator Fiscal rather
than the Children's Reporter, but the principles are the
same for both). As such, it illustrates the increasing
procedural distance referred to by Sellin. As he goes on to
argue, each procedural step is so selective that the
"visible tip of the iceberg of crime" looks progressively
different from the huge submerged mass (another metaphor
for this is the 'crime funnel').
Figure 2.1 Procedural distance between
commission of a crime and its recording as a
statistical unit.
2.7 In principle, there is a another type of data source
that reduces even further the procedural distance between
the act and its recording: the sample survey of potential
victims or offenders. By directly questioning a
representative sample of individuals about their
experiences, it is possible to generate information about
the so-called 'dark figure' of crime, i.e. about those
incidents that go either unreported or unrecorded by the
police. There are a number of reasons, however, why such
surveys are not suitable as our primary data source for the
current exercise.
- Although there is a nationally representative
victimisation survey (the Scottish Crime Survey), its
sample is relatively small and would not allow
sub-national breakdowns, e.g. by police force or other
geographic area.
- Victimisation surveys generally offer little
information about the age of offenders, since victims
often do not know who is responsible for crimes they
experience.
- Victimisation surveys are, by definition, limited
to crimes in which there is a clearly-identifiable
individual victim. Crimes against corporate bodies
(whether public or private) and victimless crimes are,
therefore, missing from their estimates.
- Self-report offending studies also tend to be
limited in the range of crime types asked about.
- More importantly, there is currently no
nationally-representative survey of self-report
offending in Scotland, with the exception of a very
small add-on to the Scottish Crime Survey covering
12-15 year-olds.
Anti-social behaviour
Problems of definition
2.8 If the definitional issues surrounding crime are
complex, those relating to 'anti-social behaviour' are even
more so. There is no agreed definition at an agency level
of the range of behaviours that may be considered to be
'anti-social' and the subjective component in relation to
any specific behaviour is considerable. At what point, for
example, do boisterous young people become threatening, or
does 'normal' neighbour noise become a nuisance? There may
be variation here in the reactions of individuals within
the same area (older people, for example, might feel more
threatened or aggrieved than younger people by certain
types of behaviour) and in the way that communities as a
whole respond to such behaviour. It cannot be assumed, for
example, that the sight of a group of young men sitting on
a bench drinking alcohol will be greeted in the same way in
middle class suburbia, a deprived council estate and an
inner city shopping district.
Technical issues
2.9 The measurement issues are equally difficult. One
reason for this is that the meaning of anti-social
behaviour is often impossible to reduce to single, discrete
acts, but resides, instead, in a course of conduct or an
on-going relationship. Thus a conventional 'events
orientation' approach to measurement is unlikely to capture
adequately the nature of the problem. A protracted and
bitter neighbour dispute, for example, may grow out of a
relatively minor disagreement and, in such a context, other
relatively minor behaviours (such as parking in a
particular spot or tipping over a dustbin) may be seen as
(and indeed be intended as) further provocations.
2.10 Moreover, unlike much personal and property crime,
which tends to involve a one-to-one victim-offender
relationship, many people may be affected by the same
behaviour. All of the residents in a block of flats may be
affected, for example, by one noisy neighbour, or multiple
users of a shopping centre by a group of young people who
are hanging around and drinking near the entrance.
2.11 For both these reasons, it makes little sense to
talk in terms of the number of 'incidents' of anti-social
behaviour and much more sense to seek to measure it in
terms of the number of people affected. As such, however,
it becomes impossible to simply add our measures of
anti-social behaviour onto those for crime. In any case,
there would likely to be extensive 'double-counting' as
some instances of anti-social behaviour will already have
made their way into the police recorded crime
statistics.
2.12 As will be clear from the following review, there
are a variety of information sources about specific forms
of anti-social behaviour. However, for the most part, these
are likely to be more useful as indicators of
organisational activity than of actual prevalence. If the
'dark figure' of crime is considerable, that for
anti-social behaviour is likely to be many times greater.
Individuals may not feel personally victimised in the same
way, may not know that there are agencies they can turn to,
or be reluctant to do so for fear of retaliation or
exacerbating the situation. As a result, there is no
equivalent to the police recorded crime statistics to which
we can turn for even a rough guide to prevalence. Agencies'
records are likely to capture only a fraction of possible
anti-social behaviours and any increase in the numbers of
incidents or cases recorded is as likely to reflect
increased awareness as it is a change in actual
prevalence.
Fear of crime
Problems of definition
2.13 The 'discovery' of fear of crime as a distinct
social problem in its own right is relatively recent and
can be traced back to the development of national crime
surveys in many Western countries during the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s. These exercises documented for the first time
not just experiences of victimisation but public
perceptions of and attitudes towards crime and
policing.
2.14 The much heard assertion that 'fear of crime is now
more of a problem than crime itself' has its roots in the
observation that certain sections of the population
(especially women and older people) tend to exhibit high
levels of anxiety about victimisation but are at
comparatively low risk of actual victimisation. It has been
reinforced by the fact that public perceptions of and
anxieties about crime have remained static (or worsened)
during a period in which crime rates have been falling.
2.15 Such findings have led to the identification of
fear of crime as a focus for policy intervention in its own
right and as a social condition that is seen as virtually
independent of crime and detection rates. Local authorities
and police forces are thus increasingly tasked with
reducing fear of crime through a 'reassurance' agenda. The
activities of young people are a particular focus for such
strategies, not surprisingly, since, by any measure, they
contribute disproportionately to the crime rate and act as
a focus for national and local concerns about crime and
disorder.
2.16 Before looking in any detail at the sources of
information that are available about fear of crime in
general and fear of youth crime in particular, it may be
worth highlighting some of the limitations of the concept.
Within academic criminology, it is increasingly recognised
that the concept of fear of crime has been inadequately
theorised and that many of the quantitative measures
currently in use only tap into certain aspects of public
anxiety.
2.17 In particular, there has been criticism of the most
widely-used fear of crime measure, the question (taken from
the British Crime Survey series): 'How safe do you (or
would you) feel walking alone in this area after dark?'. It
is generally accepted in survey research that hypothetical
questioning is inadvisable. In this case, since most people
do not, in fact, walk alone in their area after dark,
respondents have little on which to base their experience.
As a result, the use of this single measure tends to paint
an exaggerated picture of public anxieties, all the more so
because it tends to be asked in the context of surveys
about crime.
2 If survey respondents are asked to list (unprompted)
the types of things that they worry about, crime rarely
features and issues such as money, health, relationships
and jobs feature far more prominently.
2.18 The use of crime-specific measures (e.g. 'How much
do you worry about having your home broken into?') tend to
produce very different response patterns by population
sub-group. Older people, for example, exhibit rates of
worry that are in line with (or even lower) than those of
the rest of the population for most types of crime.
2.19 In general, the most useful information about
crime-related anxiety takes account of both perceived
impact and perceived risk. In other words, respondents are
asked not only about how worried they are about certain
crime types but also about how
likely they think it is that they will become
victims. Thus women tend to say that they worry 'a great
deal' about sexual violence, not because they think
themselves especially likely to become victims, but because
of the impact if it were to happen.
2.20 Recent work around the fear of crime has also
pointed out that crime-related anxieties are often
symptomatic of a broader sense of anxiety about the pace
and direction of social change, and of a growing concern
with risk and its regulation. Magnified by the media, the
issue of crime (and youth crime) may simply provide a focus
for a much wider, but more diffuse, sense of unease about
contemporary life and be largely unrelated to the actual
victimisation experiences of individuals or
communities.
« Previous | Contents | Next »