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Measurement of the Extent of Youth Crime in Scotland

5 Measuring indicators of anti-social behaviour

Introduction

5.1 Anti-social behaviour is recognised to be a serious problem in many Scottish communities and a strategy for addressing the issue has been widely welcomed by many key stakeholders. (See "A Report on the Consultation Responses to Putting Our Communities First: A Strategy for Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour). It is also notable that some, but not all, anti-social behaviour involves young people both as victims as well as perpetrators of these offences.

5.2 In this section we discuss the difficulties in arriving at a useful, and indeed reliable, measure of anti-social behaviour and conclude that an approach that involves key indicators - generally measures of impact - may be a more helpful route to take. This is because it is highly unlikely that we will ever be able to generate accurate figures for the total amount of anti-social behaviour, given that such a high proportion goes unreported and unrecorded. We describe a number of key datasets that provide the best available information on the extent of anti-social behaviour in Scotland.

Difficulties in Estimation

5.3 Estimating prevalence and incidence levels for anti-social behaviour is much more problematic than for equivalent levels of crime. A fundamental difficulty is that there is no generally accepted definition of anti-social behaviour. ^{25 ,26} The legal definition that is used in England - "acting in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not in the same household as the defendant" ²⁷ - is too broad to be helpful.

5.4 Conceptually it is more useful to think of the problem as a spectrum of behaviour types ranging from neighbour problems (a dispute arising from nuisance, e.g. noise) and neighbourhood problems (incivilities within public spaces e.g. littering) at one end of the scale to those resulting in a legally definable crime or offence at the other end (e.g. vandalism, fire-raising, breach of the peace, etc.) ²⁸.

5.5 Some of these behaviours are captured by criminal statistics, e.g. vandalism and fire-raising, but many other forms are not reliably and consistently recorded throughout the country. Other forms of anti-social behaviour, for instance noise nuisance and fly-tipping, may be reported to the local authority who have statutory powers to deal with them, and there is a further potential overlap between the data sources in that non-compliance with orders issued by local authorities may then become a crime. This is outlined in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1. Overview of crime and anti-social behaviour.

5.6 Furthermore, many behaviours that are termed "youth nuisance" are not actually recognised as crimes at all and different police forces record incidents of these behaviours under different categories, such as "youth nuisance", "youths causing annoyance" and "community problems". Given these problems, it is not actually known how frequently "youth nuisance" behaviour take place.

5.7 An additional problem in measurement is that what constitutes anti-social behaviour is highly subjective. For example, some people may regard a group of youths hanging around a bus stop as nuisance behaviour, but others will regard it as perfectly normal. The Youthlink survey suggests that over half of young people like to spend time 'hanging about on the streets.'

5.8 A small survey of the eight police forces in Scotland was conducted by the research team as part of this study. This concluded that, at present, the level of consistency with which anti-social behaviour is recorded across Scotland is poor, although there are examples of good practice. Therefore police warnings data would not give us a true estimate of scale of the problem across the country as a whole, although for some areas (e.g. Tayside and Dumfries & Galloway), reasonably good, recent data does exist.

5.9 The introduction of the Scottish Executive's proposals on Restorative Justice ²⁹ should ultimately bring a degree of standardisation to the approach when a programme has been fully established in each force area. However, some police forces are further ahead than others in introducing a plan that addresses these proposals.

5.10 To properly assess the problem of anti-social behaviour would require a study that attempted to estimate the proportion of people who perceived various possible forms of anti-social behaviour to be a problem. This will have difficulties because what people perceive to be anti-social behaviour is very subjective and may or may not be justified. To produce estimates of incidence levels of anti-social behaviour would require a self-reporting study involving young people on the types of anti-social behaviour they engage in and the frequency of this behaviour. This has not been done in Scotland on a sufficient scale to give reliable results.

5.11 One final option is to review the data held by the SCRA on "no case to answer" cases. Many of these will involve anti-social behaviour and, paradoxically, can lead to some form of action being taken, e.g. referring back the case to the local authority or agreeing an approach with the family or another agency. However, this will only give us limited information and will not be sufficient to provide reliable estimates for what will be vast numbers of behavioural types.

5.12 In view of these shortcomings of available data, we have opted for an approach that looks at a number of key indicators of different types of anti-social behaviour, drawing on information provided by a variety of datasets. An outline of our approach is discussed later in this section and is followed by a description of the main sources of information on anti-social behaviour. First of all, however, we review briefly the impact of anti-social behaviour by young people and how its various effects might be traced.

Tracing the impact of anti-social behaviour

5.13 There is no comprehensive or systematic way in which one can provide a definitive assessment of the impact of anti-social behaviour or the fear of youth crime. It is, however, possible to unpack some of the ways in which these may impact on the lives of individuals and communities.

5.14 The effects of youth crime are generally thought of in terms of the direct effects on individuals who are confronted by problems related to youth crime, which can be both short-term and longer-term. These might include:

• repairing or replacing any property stolen or damaged;
• time spent dealing with the consequences of such behaviour (e.g. telephoning the police, engaging with the criminal justice system, clearing up) and not spent, as a result, on other things - e.g. employment, childcare, etc.;
• physical or psychological impacts (such as injuries sustained in an assault, anxiety, etc.); and
• consequences for individual behaviour (avoidance of particular areas or situations, impact on work and leisure activities, etc.)

5.15 Of course, this tends to assume on a one-to-one model of the offender-victim relationship. In the case of anti-social behaviour, however, the relationship is more likely to be one-to-many. In other words, a single act or occurrence of anti-social behaviour may impact on a wide range of different people, and do so differently in relation to each. For example, if a group of young people spend an evening drinking and socialising noisily outside a shop, leaving behind them broken glass and graffiti, who might be affected and how? The shop owner would have to clear up the debris and spend time trying to remove the graffiti. They might have to delay their opening time the next morning and lose custom as a result, quite apart from the impact on their business during the course of the evening itself. Local people may have felt intimidated by the commotion and are unwilling to walk past the young people, with consequences for their ability to access local facilities. People living nearby may have had their sleep disrupted and had to spend time contacting the local police. The police themselves will have had to expend time dealing with the problem, even if there was no clear evidence of an actual crime being committed, with consequences for their ability to deal effectively with more serious incidents.

5.16 Quite how such diverse impacts could be traced or quantified is far from clear. Moreover, it makes little sense to assume a standard cost or impact for a particular form of behaviour, since the significance of that behaviour is determined less by what is actually done (e.g. a window broken, a group of young people hanging around drinking) than by who is affected by it. If a group of young people choose to hang around in the woods, drinking and using drugs, the impact for the wider community is negligible, even if the risks to the young people themselves may be heightened by their lack of visibility. Indeed, it could even be argued that such behaviour is not anti-social behaviour, since no-one else is likely to be affected by it. Moreover, the sensibilities of different communities vary greatly: what appears frightening or alarming to the residents of one neighbourhood may pass unnoticed in another.

5.17 So far, we have discussed only the impact of youth crime and anti-social behaviour on individuals. In aggregation, however, these individual-level impacts begin to have wider consequences for the functioning of communities as a whole. If, for example, an area develops a reputation for rowdiness or young people hanging around the streets, visitors from other areas may be deterred, with consequences for the profitability and viability of shops and other local services. New businesses may become reluctant to invest in the area.

5.18 If visible signs of anti-social behaviour, such as broken glass and graffiti are not swiftly dealt with, further problems are more likely to ensue. This is the phenomenon captured famously in Wilson and Kelling's (1982) 'broken windows' thesis. They argued that visible signs of decay, if left uncorrected, undercut residents' own efforts to maintain their homes and neighbourhoods and to control unruly behaviour. "If a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired," they wrote, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. . . . One unrepaired window is a signal that no one cares, so breaking more windows costs nothing. . . . Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder." ³⁰

Key indicators

5.19 It is possible to produce a point estimate, at least for some forms of anti-social behaviour, by taking data on recorded anti-social behaviour and grossing up using multipliers based on self report studies, etc. This is done in Tables 4.1 and 4.2 for anti-social behaviour that are also crime types, e.g. vandalism and fire-raising. However, given the difficulties in defining other forms of anti-social behaviour as well as the lack of data sources by which these behaviour types are accurately recorded, we do not believe that it is possible to provide estimates of other types of anti-social behaviour.

5.20 We instead favour a 'key indicators' approach that involves drawing evidence from public perception surveys. The key sources for these in Scotland are the Scottish Household Survey (SHS), the Youth Lifestyles Survey, the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, and the 1995 Baseline Study on Housing Management. The SHS is particularly relevant and, because of its scale, it provides a useful source of data at local authority level; in consequence, it forms the main focus of this section.

5.21 Listed below in Table 5.1 are a range of behaviour types that are classified as anti-social by the Government's multi-agency Policy Action Team on Anti-social Behaviour. The table provides details on the availability of Scottish data sources to measure them, if any, and the limitations of these sources.

5.22 The focus of the Policy Action Team on neighbourhood renewal was particularly on acts that cause problems in residential neighbourhoods and less on behaviour in areas such as town centres. It does not, for example, include dropping litter as an offence, even though this is an offence for which people can be fined.

5.23 The studies mentioned above have been reviewed in the context of this assessment of the scale of anti-social behaviour and the relevant findings are highlighted below.

Perception Surveys on Anti-Social Behaviour

Scottish Household Survey

5.24 The Scottish Household Survey is a continuous survey based on a sample of the general population in private residences in Scotland. It started in 1999 and is funded by the Scottish Executive and undertaken by a partnership of NFO System Three Social Research and MORI Scotland. The most recent publication is the Annual Report for 2001/02, which is based on data from 30,639 households and 28,685 individuals collected in 2001/ 2002.

5.25 The aim of the survey is to provide representative information about the composition, characteristics and behaviours of Scottish households. A number of the topics covered are of particular interest in the context of this study.

• Neighbourhood ratings as a place to live - 2001/02 survey.
• Experience of neighbourhood problems/ disputes - 2001/02 survey.
• Perceptions of safety from crime - 2002 survey only (discussed in Section 6 - Fear of Crime).
• Experience of crime (2001 survey only).

5.26 The SHS does not tell us how many of the problem issues are attributable to young people, with one exception. The SHS contains one question which specifically asks about groups of young people hanging about. However the wording of the question is as follows "How common would you say the following things are in this neighbourhood?" The third item on the list then presented is "groups of young people hanging around on the street". Respondents have the option of stating whether this is "very common", "fairly common", "not very common", "not at all common", or "don't know".

5.27 Thus the survey treats the mere act of young people hanging about in the street as problematic, regardless of whether they are actually intimidating or whether there are any other more specific anti-social behaviours being committed.

Neighbourhood Ratings

5.28 The overwhelming majority of adults interviewed for the SHS have a positive opinion of their neighbourhoods with over 90% saying their area is a "very good" or a "fairly good" place to live. However, there is considerable variation in this opinion between tenures, with only around one-third of social rented tenants saying their area is a very good place to live, compared with over 50% of those buying their home and over 60% of those who own their home outright. The groups that have the least favourable opinion of their own neighbourhood are those living in social rented accommodation (local authority or housing association properties).

5.29 Table 5.2 summarises the response to the this question for the two extreme opinions, i.e. the area is a very good or very poor place to live.

5.30 The general opinion on the quality of the neighbourhood also varies by household type, with single parents being significantly more likely than other household types (families, pensioners and single adults) to say their area is a poor place to live. Finally, residents in rural areas are more likely than those in urban areas to rate their areas highly.

Experience of Neighbourhood Problems

5.31 The SHS asks about a number of neighbourhood problems, such as noisy neighbours, groups of young people hanging around, litter, vandalism and drug problems. Across all areas the relative frequency of the problems is similar. Litter and groups of young people hanging around being the most common issues and having noisy neighbours is the least common problem (Table 5.3).

5.32 The types of problems asked about in the survey are most commonly experienced in areas of social housing and by single parent, single adult and large family households. They are also more commonly features of urban rather than rural living. People living in rural areas are the least likely to experience these types of problems.

5.33 Table 5.4 highlights the extent to which the incidence of neighbourhood problems varies throughout Scotland. The proportion of adults reporting that each of the 5 problem types is very or fairly common has been ranked by local authority area and this shows clearly the urban/ rural dimension to the scale of these anti-social behavioural issues.

5.34 Glasgow has the highest proportions of adults stating that each of these problems is common in their neighbourhoods. North Lanarkshire and Edinburgh also have high proportions of adults mentioning particular issues such as litter and noisy neighbours (Edinburgh) or people using drink or drugs (North Lanarkshire). Rural areas such as the Highlands and Islands and Southern Scotland tend to have lower proportions mentioning these types of issues.

Groups of Young People

5.35 The issue of groups of young people hanging around is of particular relevance to this study. There is considerable variation in the extent to which this is reported as very or fairly common, ranging from 6-7% in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles to over 40% in Glasgow, West Dumbartonshire, Clackmannan, Falkirk and Midlothian.

5.36 The margin of error on these results for the cities in Scotland is shown in Table 5.5. The main point to note is that the survey was designed to generate results which were reasonably reliable at the local authority level, therefore all figures provide a fairly good indicator of the extent to which these issues are generally of concern to the public in the areas concerned.

5.37 The margin of error reduces with larger sample sizes and for extremes of results. For example, on a sample of 3,000 responses (Glasgow) and a result of 13% (the percentage of people reporting that noisy neighbours/ loud parties are a very of fairly common problem in their areas), we are 95% confident that the true proportion of the population at large which view this as a problem is between 11.5% and 14.5%.

5.38 Conversely, the margin of error increases with smaller sample sizes and mid-ranging results (i.e. responses of around 50%). Aberdeen has the smallest sample size of all the cities (788 responses) therefore the margins of error on these results tend to be greater than for the other cities. The figure with the highest margin of error is the 27% of respondents who said that groups of young people hanging around was a very or fairly common problem in their area. On this result, we are 95% confident that the true proportion of the population in Aberdeen that view this to be a problem is between 23.8% and 30.2%.

Neighbour Disputes

5.39 The incidence of neighbour disputes is also a topic that is covered by the SHS, and although it should not be automatically concluded that a high proportion of those who create such problems will be young people, the findings show that young adults (aged 16 to 24) are slightly more likely to experience these problems than those aged 45+. It is likely that anti-social behaviour may be involved in cases of dispute.

5.40 Overall, 91% of adults aged 16+ do not experience any form of neighbour dispute (Table 5.6). Among young to middle-aged adults (aged 16 - 44), this proportion falls to 87% and a larger proportion in this age band report frequent (i.e. 4 or more) cases of dispute in the past 12 months.

5.41 Those living in large urban areas are more likely to report a more frequent level of disputes with neighbours. Disputes are also more commonly experienced by:

• single parents;
• those in large households (containing three or more children);
• those in social rented accommodation; and
• those in maisonette/ flatted properties.

Self Report Data on Anti- Social Behaviour by Young People

5.42 There have been a number of self report studies where young people indicate the extent to which they have been involved in crime and in various types of anti-social behaviour. Some of these studies also provide information about whether the young person was 'caught' by an adult or other authority figure carrying out the criminal or anti-social act.

5.43 While these studies confirm that a very high proportion of anti-social behaviour by young people goes unobserved - and thus unreported and undetected - the way that they report data on getting caught ³¹ makes it difficult to use the information to gross up recorded anti- social behaviour to provide a true record of the level of anti-social behaviour.

5.44 One of the most important self report studies is the Edinburgh Youth Transitions study. In addition to information about self reported levels of anti-social behaviour, the Edinburgh study also has the potential to link this data with neighbourhood conditions as all the data collected has been geo-coded using postcode information for the individual young person.

5.45 One of the main aims of the Edinburgh study is stated to be to :

"examine the interactions between individual level factors (e.g. personality, family, etc) and neighbourhood level factors (e.g. the physical environment in which people live, social controls within the community, etc) which contribute to criminal offending. In order to study the social geography of Edinburgh and understand these neighbourhood level factors better, a computerised geographic information system (GIS) has been developed . Various sources of geo-coded data are being examined, including police recorded crime statistics, census data and locally available data from the City of Edinburgh Council on unemployment, land use and housing.

5.46 The information about neighbourhoods is being used to study crime patterns in three main ways:

• The postcode of each member of the cohort has been geo-coded, so any piece of information about members of the cohort (including their offending behaviour) can be visualised spatially (on a map) and compared with other pieces of geo-coded information (e.g. local unemployment). This information can also be entered into a database and analysed statistically, to provide a better understanding of offending behaviour in the context of the environment in which young people live.
• The GIS has also been used to define 91 neighbourhoods in Edinburgh, based on six census characteristics indicating levels of social stress and police recorded crime data. Two matched case study areas have been selected on the basis that they have similar social and physical characteristics, but very different crime rates. Ethnographic and observational research has been carried out in these areas, and the research team are currently examining the factors that might explain these contrasting crime rates between areas.
• An Edinburgh-wide community study will be conducted in 2002. This will involve surveying a representative sample of the adult population to examine the influences of neighbourhood and community on crime and criminality in Edinburgh. In particular, this work will seek to identify the informal mechanisms by which communities control crime and anti-social behaviour.

5.47 Some relevant findings from another self-report study, the Youthlink survey, include the following.

• The most popular spare time activity among Scotland's 11-16 year olds is listening to music (81%). Over half (52%) like to spend time 'hanging about on the streets'; a quarter attend youth clubs or other clubs and 9% attend uniformed clubs. Older young people (17-25 year olds) most like to watch TV in their spare time (81%). Just 3% attend youth work activities.
• One in ten young people reported to having been a victim of racist abuse, but attitudes appear to be predominantly non-racist - at least seven in ten young people regard using terms such as 'chinky' or 'paki', speaking negatively in private about people from different ethnic backgrounds and being impolite or verbally offensive to people from different ethnic backgrounds to be either slightly or strongly racist.

5.48 The finding that over half of young people like to spend time hanging about on the streets is an important one, given that this is an activity which it is proposed should be subject to further control.

5.49 The Glasgow Youth Survey concluded that while most young people say that they have not actually broken the law in the past year, many admit to a range of criminal and/or anti-social behaviour. A summary of crime/anti-social behaviour types admitted to is shown in Figure 5.1, together with the proportion of young people who claim to have been caught for the act.

5.50 These findings cannot be strictly compared with our estimates of youth crime as they consider prevalence rather than incident rates, but they do demonstrate the extent of the amount of crime and anti-social behaviour that is not reported or recorded, particularly for crimes like shoplifting and vandalism.

Source: MORI Scotland

5.51 The figure shows:

• How common certain forms of anti-social behaviour are amongst young people - particularly litter dropping, fare- dodging and graffiti; and
• how certain types of crime and anti-social behaviour are likely to go undetected, for example, fewer than 20% of young people who have stolen from shops were detected, and an even lower proportion are likely to have been charged.

Experience of Crime

5.52 The 2001 sweep of the SHS asked interviewees about their actual experience of crimes (rather than their perceptions). The results provide an interesting additional dimension to the overall scale of these problems by detailing where and by whom they are most likely to be experienced. Unfortunately, these questions were not repeated in the 2002 survey therefore the base data for these questions relates to a different group of people than the data from the SHS that has so far been discussed. The data are presented in Table 5.7.

5.53 With the exception of vandalism, which was experienced by 10% of adults across the sample, all of the remaining crimes (i.e. housebreaking, motor vehicle theft, assault) were fairly uncommon. Housebreaking had been experienced by between 1% (Fife, Highlands and Islands, Lothian) and 4% of adults (South Lanarkshire) over the past year. Motor vehicle theft had been experienced by less than 1% of adults in Southern Scotland and 6% of adults in North Lanarkshire. In no area had more than 2% of adults experienced physical assault.

5.54 There is some variation in the experience of crime across different households and different neighbourhood types.

• Single adult households and single parent households reported higher rates of housebreaking than other household types.
• Adults in the privately rented sector are more likely to experience housebreaking.
• Vehicle theft is more common among adults living in the social rented sector than in other tenures.
• Vandalism is more common in urban areas than in rural areas.

Crime Against Commercial and Public Properties

5.55 So far, this section has considered perceptions of anti-social behaviour that have been reported by adults living in private households. However, there are other types of anti-social behaviour that also need to be taken into account. The costs of types of crime and anti-social behaviour against commercial properties and public buildings/places, e.g. schools, bus shelters, etc., can be more easily identified.

5.56 The extent of crime against commercial property has most recently been covered in Scotland by the "Counting the Cost" survey of 2,500 businesses, which was undertaken in 1999 ³².

5.57 The key conclusions from this study were:

• 58% of businesses reviewed experienced crime in 1998;
• 50% had experienced property crime (vandalism/ break-in);
• crime is heavily targeted at a relatively small proportion of businesses;
• there are links between working patterns and the risk of crime and between geography and the risk of crime; and
• the cost of crime to all 5 sectors under review in the study in Scotland in 1998 was £678M.

5.58 Although it is not known precisely who the perpetrators of these crimes are, and therefore not possible to attribute an exact proportion of this cost to young people, high proportions of vandalism & break-ins are committed by young people.

5.59 Anti-social behaviour resulting in crime against public properties/littering of public places will have a measurable economic cost that is documented by the relevant public agency or department. The most recently published source in this respect relates to the cost of vandalism and fire-raising to schools in Scotland. Audit Scotland reported that by 2001, this amounted to £8.3 million, down from £12 million in 1995 ³³. It further reports that the majority of councils suffer over £1,000 worth of damage per school per year, on average.

5.60 Further data on the cost of damage to other public properties in Scotland could not be traced at the time of writing this report (nothing relevant in this respect had been published by either the Scottish Executive or by Audit Scotland).

Conclusions

5.61 To summarise the evidence on the scale of anti-social behaviour, Table 5.7 pulls together the available survey evidence for Scotland under the main anti-social behaviour types as classified by the Government's multi-agency Policy Action Team.

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