Youth and crime in the Swedish counties 1995—2005
English summary of Brå report 2007:30
Youth crime attracts a great deal of attention in the crime policy debate. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention is often asked to respond to questions relating to both the extent of youth crime, and how it has changed over time.
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- © Brottsförebyggande rådet 2008
- urn:nbn:se:bra-299
- Report 2007:30
About the study
Producing a picture of the crimes that young people have committed or been exposed to requires the use of several different sources. Official crime statistics constitute one such source that has long been used by crime researchers. One major advantage with data on the number of youths suspected of offences, for example, is that they can be studied both over time and in terms of their geographical distribution. It is well known, however, that the number of youths who become registered as suspects in connection with crime accounts for only a small proportion of those youths who actually commit various types of criminal offences over the course of a given year. In order to produce a better description of youth offending, researchers therefore often employ questionnaire surveys, in which young people are themselves asked to report their experiences of involvement in crime under conditions of anonymity.
The National Council for Crime Prevention administers a nationally representative self-report study of crime among youth in their final year of compulsory education which has been conducted in Sweden every second year since 1995. The survey constitutes an important source of data in relation to assessments of the state of youth crime in Sweden. The latest in a series of reports based on the school survey was published towards the end of 2006. The publication of the report gave rise to a large number of questions, not least from a variety of actors whose interest was focused primarily on the situation at the local rather than the national level. Many were interested for example in the question of whether the trend over time at the national level was reflected in the trend for various municipalities, cities or counties. Another common question was that of whether the amount of youth crime varied between different parts of the country.
The nature of this response pointed to a gap that the National Council’s presentation of the national school survey findings had left in the knowledge, since to date we had not presented these findings broken down on the basis of the respondents’ geographical location. The National Council hopes that this new report will provide an answer to at least some of the questions that have been posed.