Fandom Gruff ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) UNFLIPPED THREAD

[MrBehemoth]

tl;dr - Youth crime in Australia is bad.

Hmmmm. I can think of a few reasons why this is dubious.

Spoiler below!

1) Maybe traffic violations are more likely to be committed by people over 20, but that's because more people over 20 drive. You could say that the survey is biased towards "young people's crimes", that is crimes that are more likely to be committed by a young person than an older person.

2) There's no control group here. If 40% of 14-18 years admit to having committed one of these crimes, what percentage of people over 18 years old would also admit to having committed a crime? Are people under 18 more likely to admit it? Besides, actual career criminals are more likely to be younger simply by virtue of the fact the they are less likely to have been caught and imprisoned yet, or less likely to have "gone straight" yet.

3) Dogfood's point about gangs. The study Rom is quoting goes into this in more detail (sorry mate, hope you don't mind me checking your sources ) and explains that they were asked 2 questions: "Do you consider your special group of friends to be a gang?" and "Are you a member of a gang?". It goes on to say, "gang membership was the unit of analysis (dependent variable), and was created by transforming the two questions mentioned above into a single variable labelled ‘gang membership’." In other words, the survey does not differentiate between a Perthian equivalent of Bloods and Crips or Dogfood's crew. Obviously there is a world of difference. Furthermore, "Because we were also interested in the likelihood of gang membership, logistic regression was also undertaken, with the aim of identifying those variables that increase the likelihood or probability of gang membership." In other words, the types and severity of crimes influenced whether or not a young person was seen as being likely to be part of a gang. In that sense, you're bound to come to the conclusion that more severe crimes are committed by people in gangs, if that's what you use to decide whether they're in a gang or not.

4) Lots of these crimes depend on context. For example, "drug dealing" could include picking up a small amount of weed for a friend. "Motor vehicle theft" could be "borrowing" your parent's car without permission and putting it back before they noticed. Stealing could be petty shoplifting, or even piracy. Fighting could be a playground scuffle. I think that between the ages of 14 and 18, me and my friends committed all of those, and while they were all against the law, nobody would have called us criminals or delinquents. Some of these crimes, i.e., under age drinking, "light" drugs like cannabis and occasional fighting have been part of growing up since, like, forever.

I'm not saying that youth crime in Perth is not a problem - it could be a big problem for all I know, and I did grow up in the countryside and now live a small city with a fairly minor crime problem so maybe I'm sheltered/naive.

But I do think that the study and the article have an agenda. (All scientific/statistical studies have the agenda of justifying their continued funding.) For contrast, this far less scholarly (and therefore admittedly subjective) article points out how perception of youth crime has changed in the last couple of hundred years. [Edit: or rather, how it hasn't)