Youth and violence (February 2008)

Youth violence and crime have become firmly established as constant topics of public discussion and perception. The debate revolving around various aspects such as the increasing brutality of young offenders, the sense of prevention measures, reforms of juvenile penal law, and education is constantly being stoked by newsworthy events. As an example, on February 14, 2008, a bloody killing spree committed by a young student in Illinois, represents the latest horrifying event in a long series of violent crimes committed by juvenile offenders. In Germany recently the mugging of a senior citizen in the Munich underground committed by a 17 year old Greek and a 20 year old Turkish male, was taken as an occasion by the media and by the political parties in their election campaigns for local parliament seats, to ratchet up the discussion on juvenile crime.

Social science research on the topic of “Youth and violence” surely does not remain unaffected by all of this. “Research Special” responds to this development by offering an overview of current social science literature and research projects on this topic. The references are taken from the GESIS databases SOLIS and SOFIS as well as the six social science English language databases produced by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA).

Got to the PDF (free of charge).