Youths and crime 1995—2005

The extent of, and trends in, youth crime constitute important and recurrent themes in the social debate. Producing as accurate a picture of youth crime as possible is therefore of central importance to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet – Brå). It is now well-established that many of the offences committed by young people are never detected, reported and registered. This means that official crime statistics, although important in their own right, can never provide a complete picture of youth crime. Self-report studies provide an important source of knowledge on the actual extent and character of youth crime, and of trends in youth crime over time, and serve as a complement to the information contained in official statistics.

In 1995 and 1997, the Department of Criminology at the University of Stockholm conducted the first nationally representative Swedish self-report surveys of youth in their final year of compulsory education (year nine). Since 1999, these studies have been conducted biennially by the National Council for Crime Prevention. The completion of the 2005 study has concluded the first decade of this survey series. The combined data from these surveys make Sweden one of only a few European countries that are able to describe trends in youth crime on the basis of anything other than official crime statistics alone.

The overarching objective of the study presented in this report has been to describe trends in the proportion of youths who have themselves participated in crime and other problem behaviours, and to describe the proportion of youths who have been exposed to crime, over the period 1995–2005.