Self-reported youth delinquency in Europe and beyond: First results of the Second International Self-Report Delinquency Study in the context of police and victimization data
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370809358018 |
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Corresponding author:
Dirk Enzmann, University of Hamburg, Schlueterstr. 28, Hamburg, D-20146, Germany.
Email: dirk.enzmann@uni-hamburg.de
Self-reported youth
delinquency in Europe and
beyond: First results of the
Second International
Self-Report Delinquency Study
in the context of police and
victimization data
Dirk Enzmann
University of Hamburg, Germany
Ineke Haen Marshall
Northeastern University, USA
Martin Killias
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Josine Junger-Tas
University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Majone Steketee
Verwey-Jonker Institute, The Netherlands
Beata Gruszczynska
Warsaw University, Poland
Abstract
This ar ticle reports on the first results of the Second International Self-Report Delinquency
Study (ISRD-2), a large international collaborative study of delinquency and victimization of
12–15-year-old students. The analysis is based on a subsample of the data set: 43,968 respondents
from 63 cities and 31 countries. The prevalence rates of the major categories of delinquency,
both for individual countries as well as for 6 countr y clusters, are presented as well as data for
European Journal of Criminology
7(2) 159–183
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370809358018
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160 European Journal of Criminology 7(2)
victimization experiences (theft and robbery/extortion). Using different measures, significant
differences in level and type of offending are found between country clusters, with the Western
European and Anglo-Saxon countries generally (but not always) scoring highest, followed by
Northern Europe, Latin American and Mediterranean countries, with post-socialist countries
at the bottom. The results for victimization experiences do not follow this pattern. The second
part of the article compares ISRD-2 offending and victimization rates with two other main
sources of internationally available crime-related statistics: International Crime Victim Survey
(ICVS) data and European Sourcebook (i.e. police-based) data. The analyses show a moderate
level of support for a convergence of different measures. The article concludes with implications
and suggestions for further research.
Keywords
cross-national comparison, ISRD-2, police data, self-reports, victimization studies, youth
delinquency
As in other fields, international comparative research has gained much momentum
over the last two decades. For researchers, this research increases opportunities for
testing theories, while for policy-makers, it allows for assessment of their policies
through ‘benchmarking’. For all these initiatives, the development of cross-national
indicators was crucial. In criminology, two types of readily available data have been
used to situate a country’s particular ‘crime problem’ in the larger international con-
text: First, international organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations provide
officially recorded crime data for a large number of countries (i.e. crime reported to
police, arrests, prosecutions, convictions).1 The work on the European Sourcebook –
which we will use later in this article – exemplifies current attempts to make such
official statistics more comparable and thus useful within the European context (Aebi
et al., 2006).
A second important source of comparative crime data are those generated by the
International Crime Victim Survey (ICVS) (van Dijk et al., 2007a, 2007b). In spite of
many early sceptics, the ICVS has gained a strong foothold in comparative crime
research. A number of publications have focused on the reconciliation of often divergent
results of the ICVS and official police crime data (e.g. Aebi et al. 2002; Robert, 2009;
Zauberman, 2009). Both sources, no matter their limitations, have contributed signifi-
cantly to a better understanding of crime and victimization in large parts of the world.
But these two sources, admittedly, provide only part of the story.
In this article, we introduce the Second International Self-Reported Delinquency
Study (ISRD-2). Although self-report surveys of delinquency have been a mainstay of
delinquency research for more than half a century, these studies typically have been lim-
ited to one, or at the most, a handful of countries (e.g. Wikström and Svensson, 2008,
focus on Sweden and England).2 At the European level, there are few comparative stud-
ies focusing on youth; one example is the European School Survey Project on Alcohol
and Other Drugs (ESPAD) (see Hibell et al., 2004).3 Another example is the Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA), an internationally standardized assessment
of 15-year olds in schools, implemented in 62 countries worldwide in 2009. The WHO
report on the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) contains international
self-report data on cannabis use, fighting and bullying (Currie et al., 2008). Data on
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