Explaining Crime » Explaining Crime: Age

Why is crime linked to age?

In the last lesson you saw that offending in the figures is highest among teenagers and young adults. This lesson asks why. There is no single answer. Sociologists give several explanations, and each one looks at a different part of young people's lives.

Key terms:

• Police targeting: when the police focus more of their attention on some groups or places than others.
• Stop and search: a power that lets the police stop a person in a public place and search them for items such as weapons or stolen goods.
• Gang culture: the shared rules, values and ways of behaving of a group of people, often young, who see themselves as a gang.
• Status frustration: the anger and sense of failure people feel when they cannot gain respect or success by approved routes, such as doing well at school.

Police targeting and stop and search

The police cannot watch everybody. They decide where to patrol and who to stop. Many police forces focus on young people, especially young people who gather in groups in public places such as parks, bus stops and shopping streets.

This means a young person is more likely to be stopped and searched than an older person doing exactly the same thing. More young people are therefore caught, recorded and charged. Part of the age pattern may come from who the police look at, not only from who commits crime. Some crimes, such as white-collar crime, happen out of sight and are less often detected.

Stereotyping and the self-fulfilling prophecy

Remember, a stereotype is a fixed, simple idea about a whole group. A common stereotype is that teenagers are troublemakers. Shop staff, teachers and police may expect trouble from young people, so they watch them more closely and treat them more suspiciously.

This can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. A young person who is always treated as a suspect may begin to feel that they have nothing to lose. They may start to act the way they are expected to act. The label creates the behaviour it predicted.

Gang culture

Many young people join a group of friends who share the same neighbourhood and interests. Sometimes this becomes a gang with its own culture. Members may feel loyalty, respect and protection. They may also be expected to prove themselves by breaking the law, such as stealing, fighting or carrying weapons.

For some young people, a gang offers the belonging, status and money that they cannot find elsewhere. Young people may be drawn to gangs because their identity is still forming and approval from friends matters a great deal to them.

Socialisation and social control

Young people are still learning the norms and values of society. Families, schools and peer groups all socialise them. If the family or school does not teach norms of behaviour well, or if peers teach different values, a young person may learn that crime is acceptable.

Young people are also often less controlled than young children (who are closely supervised) and than many adults (who have jobs, partners and children to lose). Teenagers can have a lot of free time with little social control. With fewer reasons to stay out of trouble, offending is more likely. Many people stop offending as they take on adult responsibilities.

Lack of opportunity

Many young people have few lawful ways to gain money or independence. They may be too young for most jobs, and in areas with high youth unemployment there may be few jobs at all. A young person who wants nice clothes or a phone, but has no income, may turn to theft or selling drugs.

This explanation links to age because young people have less money, less power and fewer routes to success than adults.

Status frustration

The American sociologist Albert Cohen studied working-class boys in the 1950s. He argued that schools judge everyone by middle-class standards, such as good manners and exam success. Many working-class boys do badly by these standards, and they end up at the bottom of the school's status ladder.

This causes status frustration. The boys still want respect, so they look for it somewhere else. They form groups that turn the school's values upside down. In these groups, breaking rules, truancy and vandalism win respect. Cohen's idea shows how failing at school can push young people towards crime.

You will meet Cohen's idea again as part of subcultural theories in a later lesson, where it is compared with other theories.

Exam-style question

(a) Define the term stop and search. [2 marks]

(b) Explain three reasons why young people may be more likely than older people to appear in crime statistics. [6 marks]