Starting a fire together: The dynamics of co-offending in juvenile arson
| Author | Sara Uhnoo |
| Published date | 01 May 2016 |
| Date | 01 May 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370815617189 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Criminology
2016, Vol. 13(3) 315 –331
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370815617189
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Starting a fire together:
The dynamics of co-offending
in juvenile arson
Sara Uhnoo
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
Criminology has an incomplete and imprecise understanding of the qualitative aspects of juvenile
co-offending. This article explores one type of juvenile crime, namely arson. Using publicly
available judicial records, it analyses 60 cases of fire-setting in Sweden in which there were two
or more perpetrators aged under 21 acting jointly. The resulting categorization shows the social
organization of juvenile fire-setting to be centred around nine different positions that a young
person can take during the planning, preparation and commission phase of an arson offence. The
findings highlight the usefulness of bringing together criminological research on co-offending and
juvenile fire-setting to better understand the dynamics driving and facilitating youth arson and
group aspects of youth delinquency and crime more generally.
Keywords
Arson, co-offending, fire-setting, instigation to crime, youth crime
Introduction
It is well known that young people frequently commit crime with one or more accom-
plices (for example, Reiss and Farrington, 1991). Close consideration of the fact is then
essential for understanding and explaining youth crime, with some even arguing that
‘delinquency is virtually incomprehensible without attention to its social character’
(Warr, 2002: 32). Nevertheless, the question of how group offending unfolds in reality is
only seldom studied, as are the specific ways in which the group setting influences the
motive and modus operandi in, for example, juvenile fire-setting incidents. Current theo-
ries of delinquency for the most part, and rather conventionally, ‘portray delinquent
groups as mere aggregates of like-minded or similarly motivated individuals’ (Warr,
Corresponding author:
Sara Uhnoo, Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, PO Box 720, SE-405 30
Gothenburg, Sweden.
Email: sara.uhnoo@gu.se
617189EUC0010.1177/1477370815617189European Journal of CriminologyUhnoo
research-article2015
Article
316 European Journal of Criminology 13(3)
2002: 130). This widespread assumption is illustrated well by a pronouncement on juve-
nile fire-setters as found, for instance, in Pinsonneault (2002: 25–6): ‘To understand the
developmental context in which a fire-setting scenario is likely for an adolescent, one
merely has to imagine that there is more than one of them in a room, that someone brought
matches, and that they are bored.’
In this perspective, fire-setting is taken to occur as an apparently self-evident outcome
of a group situation in which youths gather in the same place, perceive an opportunity
and, without hesitation or internal disagreements, simply set about committing their act
jointly and in cooperation. Yet, decision-making in co-offending has been shown to be a
complex and often irrational and ambiguous process (for example, Hochstetler, 2001), and
there is little research on group fire-setting among adolescents to support this assump-
tion (Dolan et al., 2011: 381). If co-offending on the whole is as dynamic, variable and
complex a phenomenon as research has suggested (for example, Weerman, 2003), there
is reason to pay more attention to the specific qualitative characteristics of co-offending
in different types of crime.
To contribute to a better understanding of precisely those characteristics in juvenile
crime in general, and of the social organization of juvenile fire-setting more particularly,
this article analyses the co-offending processes by which criminal events involving youth
fire-setting typically occur. It focuses on the division of labour among, and positions
taken by, co-offenders in the joint commission of their crime, to identify any variation or
recurring patterns in these. The cases examined (N = 60) are all drawn from Sweden.
To better contextualize the research and the subsequent discussion, however, a look at
previous research on co-offending, on the social organization of deviance and on group
aspects of juvenile fire-setting is first in order.
Previous research: Co-offending and the social organization
of deviance
Research on co-offending has tended to focus on quantifiable aspects of crime (what
types of crimes are involved, how often and committed by which categories of perpe-
trators) and concentrate on youth crime. The latter is probably owing to co-offending’s
being most common among younger age groups (van Mastrigt and Farrington, 2009);
by the age of 20, solo offending begins to dominate (Andresen and Felson, 2010: 73).
Co-offending involves a varying number of actors, most often, however, a small group
of no more than two or three (Reiss and Farrington, 1991). The composition of these
groups tends to be relatively homogeneous in terms of age, sex, ethnicity and criminal
experience (Sarnecki and Pettersson, 2001; Warr, 2002). Co-offending in them tends to
be instigated by one of the group members who supplies the idea and motivation for
the crime and starts pushing the action forward (Warr, 2002: 38; Hochstetler, 2001).
Qualitative studies based on rich empirical data on, as well as definitions of, what it is
to instigate a crime have, however, remained surprisingly scarce and limited in their
scope (see, for example, McGloin and Nguyen, 2012).
In the same vein, other, more general features of co-offending, such as the actual pat-
terns and processes of group crime, have only intermittently been subjected to qualitative
examination and analysis (see, for example, McGloin and Nguyen, 2012; van Mastrigt
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