Criminal Behaviour Among Young People

Questions: 1. Submit your findings from the set task? 2. What are the differences in offending between male and female young people? 3. What factors are thought to influence whether a young person becomes an offender? 4. Define a young offender? Answers: 1. About 36% of the offenders are found that they have been disaffected from school. About 52% of the offenders were drug users. 80% of them were found hanging in the public place. 64% of the offenders aid that there have been influences of delinquent friends or acquaintances on them. 47%. 47% of the offenders were found to be the victims of poor parental supervision. 16% of the individuals were persistent truants. The other rates of crimes that can be observed is intricately associated with mental health disorders. 4% had emotional disorders as they had terribly from anxiety and depression. 5% of the children were noticed to exhibit inappropriate conducts such as aggression or antisocial behavior. 1% was found to be hyperactive. From Youth and Crime Case study, one can say that schizophrenia may be one of the main factors but stated that it was a rare disorder which had affected the children to be offenders in adolescence 39% of the offenders have suffered from family breakdown or divorce, 34% had lost contact with important people of lives. 20% required special educational needs, 49% had an experience of care system breakdown and 49% had issues like drug or alcohol abuse. The prevalence of offending among the young people is often found to differ from one nation to another. Similarly, the proportion of young people found offending also varies among both the genders. Different surveys conducted over the years have found that that the average age when offending starts among young people is 13.5 for males where females start offending mainly after the age of 14. However before that particular age, 12 and 13 year olds are found in similar number among both the genders who commit crimes. If one considers a particular cohort, one can find no distinction between the proportions of youngs from both the gender who pick up the habit of drinking. However from the age of 14, a marked difference is observed in the patters of their committing crimes among the males and females. It is astonishing to find out that this same cohort of people on reaching 17 shows activities where females offenders are outweighed by male offenders. This usually happens in the ratio of 3 .1 (Male: female) 2. If one wants to ponder over the kinds of crimes committed by the offenders of both the genders, then one can find that there is also a marked difference in the kinds of crimes committed by males and females. It is found that the young offenders from the female group under the age of 16 mainly performed crimes which were based on buying goods which were stolen. Others involved fighting, shoplifting and criminal damage. The same girls when crossed the age of 16 committed less crimes like less criminal damage and shoplifting (Broidy et al. 2015). However the habit of buying stolen foods and fraud based crimes were found to be conducted at constant rate. In the cohort of girls of 21 years age, reduction of different types of crimes was observed in females. However the habit of fraud and buying stolen goods persisted even at this age. If one wants to notice the kind of crimes committed by the boys, it could be stated that their crimes and kinds are very different from each other. In the 14 to 15 year cohort, boys were found to be easily getting involved in fights and assaults. Buying stolen goods and frauds were also common just like that of the girls of the same age (Young et al. 2015). About 1 in every of the 8 boys are found to be associated with offences which imposed a serious threat o the image of the nation. Boys of cohort 16 to 17 had lessened involvement in criminal damage, buying stolen goods and other theft whereas the girls rate of such activities was constant in this age group. Boys were however more involved in fighting at this stage unlike that of the girls. Another interesting feature that was observed in their young adulthood of 18 to 21 years, there was an increase in the fighting but there was complete decline in the habits of criminal damage and shoplifting unlike that of the girls. However the y picked up a new habit of workplace theft and fraudulence (Piquero, Schubert and Brame 2014). 3. A number of factors persist that have the power enough to alter a good human being into a young offender. These factors are different types of peer group pressure, peer involvement in different problem behavior, parental criminality and high proportion of unsupervised time with peers. The other factors also involve poor parental discipline and supervision, low family income, alienation and social isolation (Shaffer et al. 2015). All of them have a serious impact on the emotional and mental aspect of the growing children and they tend to judge the differences between right and wrongs. Similar factors which also affect such people are family conflict, drug and alcohol misuse, mental illness, troubled home life and poor educational attainment (Bowen et al. 2014). Other factors are lack of different skills, unemployment leading to frustration, truancy, disruptive behavior like aggression, hyperactivity and bullying also affect such individuals forcing them to commit crimes. School disorganization, school exclusion, deprivation of proper housing and homelessness results them to commit crime for survival. Lack of social commitment, early involvement in problem behavior, community disorganization, opportunity of crimes, availability of drugs and high percentage of children in community make them vulnerable to become offenders (Stockdale, Olver and Wong 2013). 4. A person within the age group of 10 to 17 when are convicted for crimes that he had conducted, then the person is often called as a young offender (Howell et al. 2013). However the age group mentioned varies among different nations. Different nations have their own set of criteria, laws and punishments for referring a young individual as an offender. The legal systems and the courts of every nation however follow one common characteristic. Each of the nations handles their cases of young offenders and their way to treat them is very different from the adult offenders (Carr et al. 2014). They are not given same punishments as that like adults and their way of handling issues of young offenders are also sensitive. For example in UK, a child from 14 years of age is considered to be responsible for their actions. Different factors always remain associated of a child turning into offenders. The nation has to take the responsibility to handle the different, social, economic, and emotion al factors sensibly to reduce the ever growing number of young offenders with time. References: Bowen, K.L., Morgan, J.E., Moore, S.C. and van Goozen, S.H., 2014. Young offenders emotion recognition dysfunction across emotion intensities: explaining variation using psychopathic traits, conduct disorder and offense severity.Journal of psychopathology and behavioral assessment,36(1), pp.60-73. Broidy, L.M., Stewart, A.L., Thompson, C.M., Chrzanowski, A., Allard, T. and Dennison, S.M., 2015. Life course offending pathways across gender and race/ethnicity.Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology,1(2), pp.118-149. Carr, Saunders, A.M., Mannheim, H. and Rhodes, E.C., 2014.Young offenders. 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