All developed countries except Japan experienced large increases in recorded crime in the 30 years from 1950. In most countries, that rise has levelled off or reversed at some point in the past 20 years.  Even so, the crime rate everywhere is now much higher than it was in 1950, and higher than in the 100 years before the Second World War.  Most offences are theft and damage to property, although the rise in violent crimes such as robbery has been particularly striking.  Most are committed by adolescents and young adults, with the peak coming at the age of 18.  So the rise in crime represents a large increase in disorders that are characteristic of youth.  It is part of a wider trend for problems and disorders of young people to increase.  A cross-national study published in 1995 showed that there were also increases in the post-war period in other youth problems, including drug abuse, excessive drinking, depression (in females), suicide (in males), and eating disorders (Rutter and Smith, 1995). In part, higher crime rates are one of the ills of prosperity, which creates more things to steal, and brings more young people to clubs and pubs in city centres on a Saturday night.  Also, changing social patterns that go with prosperity have probably weakened social controls, because communities are less tightly knit when both women and men go out to work, and houses are more often unoccupied.  But since the rise in crime is part of a more general rise in youth problems, it may also be connected with changes in the status and expectations of young people, and in the process of transition from childhood to adulthood.

The meaning of youth, and the process of growing up, have changed in important ways over the past hundred years or so.  Full-time education now continues for much longer, and entry into employment happens much later.  So for a lengthy period of their lives—up to the age of 22 in many cases—young people spend most of their time in the company of other young people rather than in mixed age groups.  That age segregation is closely connected with the ‘birth of the teenager’ in the 1950s, a race apart, with distinctive dress, language, music, and institutionalised rebellion.  With the vast increase of education and travel, and the growth of the mass media, the horizons of expectation of young people have widened, but inevitably new expectations often cannot be fulfilled.  Young people remain financially dependent for longer, but are increasingly expected to define their individuality through consumer goods.  Where decisions were once taken out of their hands by moral commands, they are now expected to make personal choices at an earlier and earlier age: choices which can have life and death consequences for themselves and others.  Sexual experiences at an earlier age not only thrust responsibility for the risk of AIDS and early pregnancy on young people, but also mean that many have to cope with the breakdown of a love relationship when they are immature.  As well as putting additional strains on adolescents, these changes also mean that it is much more difficult to be a parent now than it was a hundred years ago.

Against that background, a team of researchers in the School of Law at Edinburgh University decided in the late 1990s to launch an ambitious study of the transition from childhood to adulthood of a large group of young people.  The study focuses on crime—both offending and victimisation—and other risk behaviours, including drink, illegal drugs, and early sexual intercourse (although questions about sex will not be asked until respondents have reached their 16^th birthday).  We decided to carry out a study of young people in our local community, because Edinburgh comprises all the extremes of poverty and wealth that exist in Scotland and, more widely, in the UK.  A local study also engages the university with local institutions, such as schools or police, and simplifies the negotiation that is needed to set up a project of this kind.  Instead of drawing a sample, we chose to study as far as possible a complete ‘cohort’ of children in one school year in the City of Edinburgh: the study group consists of the young people, now aged about 15, who started in the first year of secondary school in the autumn of 1998, plus others who joined that school year up to two years later.  A total of 4,380 young people are included.  Uniquely for a longitudinal study of offending, they come from fee-paying independent schools as well as mainstream state schools, and those at special schools are also included.

We collect information once a year from the young people themselves through a questionnaire that they normally complete in a classroom situation (although some have needed help, especially in the early years, and absentees have had to be interviewed at home).  We also collect information from social work and children’s hearing files, from school records, and from teachers.  A survey of one parent of each member of the cohort has just been completed (but not yet analysed).  There is a related study of the social geography of Edinburgh, based largely on census data, which has divided the city into 91 natural neighbourhoods, so that we can understand the behaviour of young people in the context of the neighbourhood where they live.  Police-recorded crime data have been mapped onto these neighbourhoods, so that we can describe a locality both in terms of social characteristics, such as the rate of unemployment, and in terms of crime patterns.

In the first two years, when cohort members were aged 12 –13, they were asked about 15 kinds of criminal or delinquent act they might have committed.  These ranged from trivial (fare-dodging, stealing a sweet from a shop) to serious (joyriding, setting fire to a building).  They included violent behaviour, but also theft, graffiti, and damage to property.  In the same questionnaires, young people were also asked about experience of being the victim of five kinds of offence, including theft, assault, robbery, and threats.  In the second year, they were asked, in addition, about their experience of being bullied by other young people, and of being harassed by adults (‘flashing’, following around, asking you to go with them).  From the responses, we have computed scores for each cohort member to reflect the extent of their delinquency, and the extent of their experience of crime victimisation, bullying, and adult harassment.  A striking finding is that experience of crime as offender and victim tend very strongly to go together.  This relationship is so strong that a child’s level of crime victimisation is one of the two best predictors of his or her level of offending.  More surprising, and more difficult to explain, we also find that experience of adult harassment is strongly related to delinquency.

These findings suggest that in early adolescence, it is the most vulnerable young people who tend to be delinquent, and also that they are vulnerable in a number of different ways.  We now aim to find out in more detail about the links between victimisation and offending.  In part, our findings reflect the importance of the group in the lives of adolescents.  Young people who are delinquent tend to have delinquent friends, and most offences are committed by several young people together.  Much offending also takes place among members of the group, so that group members commit offences on each other.  In part, the explanation may be that offending situations are risky, and may also give rise to victimisation.  Also, a willingness to take risks may lead both to offending and to victimisation.  After allowing for explanations such as these, we hope to show whether experience of being a victim actually leads young people into delinquency.  This could happen if offending were a response to the damage caused by victimisation, for example, an attempt to strike back.  At the same time, young offenders might be learning from and imitating the behaviour of those who harmed them.

Our study confirms many others in showing that styles of parenting have a strong influence on adolescent offending.  We have used the young people’s responses to describe the strength of parents’ supervision, the level of conflict between parents and child, and the level of autonomy or trust that parents afford to the child.  The most successful style of parenting, associated with a low level of delinquency in the child, combines strong supervision with low conflict and a high level of trust or autonomy.  Successful parents therefore manage to control their child firmly without getting into serious conflict with them, and manage to persuade the child that he or she is trusted and allowed to make certain decisions.  It is particularly interesting that strong supervision is in fact related to low conflict and high autonomy.  The parents who are often in conflict with their children are those who do not supervise them closely, and at the same time their children feel they are not allowed to make their own decisions.

Just as governments cannot impose their will by force alone, so parents cannot successfully control their children by purely authoritarian methods.  More than at any time in the past, successful parenting involves negotiation, and achieving control involves appearing to give some of it up. This need for negotiated order arises out of wider social developments which have turned adolescents into an identifiable group, with a culture and, on occasion, a set of demands—the same developments that led to the post-war rise in crime.

M. Rutter and D. J. Smith (eds.) (1995).  Psychosocial disorders in young people: Time trends and their causes.

Return to  Academic Papers