Street Gang Violence in Europe

Volume 3 (4): 413–437: 1477-3708
DOI: 10.1177/1477370806067911
Copyright © 2006 European Society of
Criminology and SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA, and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
Street Gang Violence in Europe
Malcolm W. Klein
University of Southern California, USA
Frank M. Weerman
Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement,
The Netherlands
Terence P. Thornberry
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
A B S T R A C T
Levels and descriptors of violence among European street gangs are summarized
from studies reported primarily under the aegis of the Eurogang Program
initiated in 1997 and continuing still. European gang violence is placed in the
context of its American counterpart, of European non-gang youth violence, and
of the definitional and structural components of the Eurogang Program. Euro-
pean gangs in over a dozen countries reveal a wide pattern of violent behaviour
and levels of violence that are far greater than among non-gang youth, but
largely less serious than in the USA. Some of these latter differences may be
attributable to the recentness of the European gang development, the lower
levels of firearms availability, and lower levels of gang territoriality in Europe.
K E Y W O R D S
Eurogang Program / Street Gangs / Violence.
Introduction
It is widely recognized that street gangs are connected with violence.
Aggressive and violent youths are at greater risk of joining collectivities
that we call street gangs or troublesome youth groups. But it is also true
that such groups themselves promote and facilitate violence. Various
authors have reported on the symbolic or group-enhancing importance of
violence in street gangs, and violence is also often a means for illegal

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activity and maintaining a territory (Short and Strodtbeck 1965; Decker
and Van Winkle 1996; Klein and Maxson 1989; Klein 1995).
Many European countries face such youth groups, which may be
called street gangs although researchers and policy makers often hesitate to
call them this because they compare their own groups to American
stereotypes (see Klein 1997; Klein et al. 2001; Covey 2003; Decker and
Weerman 2005). Indications exist that there is a growth in street gang
problems in different countries in Europe. Therefore, the study of European
street gangs and troublesome youth groups may be very important for
understanding better the causes of youth violence in European countries. In
this article, we summarize and discuss findings about the level and nature
of violence among European street gangs that resulted from studies re-
ported under the aegis of the Eurogang Program. In this article, we use
the term ‘street gangs’ for those youth groups that meet the criteria of the
Eurogang consensus definition (durable and street-oriented youth groups
whose involvement in illegal activity is part of their group identity),
groups that may alternatively be called ‘troublesome youth groups’.
Until recently, knowledge about street gangs and street gang violence
was derived principally from research in the United States. So, too, were the
public stereotypes of gangs and gang violence. It is this first context that
sets the stage for confronting our results on gang violence in Europe. A
second context in which to place European gang violence is that of violence
among European youth in general, for which reports are available from the
International Self-Report Delinquency (ISRD) programme. Future reports
from the programme – ISRD II – will include data on the prevalence of
gang members in a score of European countries, but for now the current
youth violence data provide a useful background for evaluating emerging
knowledge about European gang violence. Finally, a third context for our
discussion is provided by work reported by Eurogang Program participants
on the development of a common definition of street gangs as well as the
structural variety of gangs developed in the USA and then applied to
Europe. Each of these three contexts – American gang violence, European
non-gang youth violence, and depiction of European gangs – will be
discussed as a prelude to our description of European gang violence as
summarized over a number of recent empirical reports using both quantit-
ative and qualitative data.
The American gang context
In conventional wisdom, street gangs in the United States are large, well-
organized entities that can control neighbourhoods. This stereotype, which
often includes high levels of violence, derives most commonly from police

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Street gang violence in Europe
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and media reports about gangs in Los Angeles and Chicago. The names are
universally recognized: Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, Black Gangster Dis-
ciples, El Ruk’n. But, as noted elsewhere (Klein et al. 2001), the stereotype
is not applicable to most street gangs in the USA, and even less so in
Europe. Our emphasis in this paper is on the violence associated with street
gangs and on the victims of that violence.
Despite all the decades of research on street gangs, including levels of
gang violence, American criminology has paid scant attention to the victims
of gang violence. A summary of gang victim findings has recently yielded
the following generalizations (Klein and Maxson 2006):
• The most common victims of gang homicides and drive-by shootings are other gang
members; gang membership can be hazardous to one’s health. Joining a gang for
protection is ironic, at best.
• The presence of females generally suppresses violence and therefore victimization.
Female victimization is far lower than that for males, but gang membership exposes
females to the heightened risk of physical and sexual violence from their gang mates,
and to violence generally in their neighbourhoods.
• Fear among community members, certainly one form of victimization, can be fuelled
and increased both by media attention to gangs and by official gang awareness and
gang suppression programmes.
• Contrasted with other violence, gang violence is more likely to appear in public
places, and to involve more weaponry and more lethal weapons, more assailants and
victims with fewer personal acquaintanceships, younger participants (with victims
being a few years older, on average, than the assailants), more motor vehicles, and
more injuries and associated charges. In a word, gang violence is more complex
and more destructive than non-gang violence. The victims are more likely to be either
‘accidental’ or at least non-predictable.
It is useful to ask how much violence is committed by American
gang members. The longitudinal study by Thornberry et al. (2003) in
Rochester provides a recent answer: the lifetime prevalence of overall
violence for male gang members is 90.6 percent, compared with 46.4 per-
cent for non-members. For the female participants, the rate for gang
members is reported as 72.2 percent, contrasted with 39.0 percent among
non-gang members.1 The authors also reported that this gang/non-gang
difference is principally found at the actual time of reported gang member-
ship, and differences are much smaller both before and after. Similar
findings have emerged from longitudinal studies in Denver, Pittsburgh,
Seattle and Montreal.
1 Violence survey items were: attack with a weapon with intent to hurt seriously, hit with the
idea of hurting, being involved in gang or posse fights, throwing objects at people, robbery,
and forcible sexual assault.

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Esbensen and Lynskey (2001) provide a more general depiction of the
levels of American gang violence, with data from 11 sites, ranging from
very rural to very urbanized. Regardless of their placement on the rural/
urban dimension, these 11 sites yielded remarkably similar levels of ‘life-
time prevalence’ rates based on self-reports among gang members. The
rates are: gang fights (82 percent), hidden weapon (76 percent), assault
(50 percent), robbery (28 percent) and shooting at someone (27 percent).
The youth reporting these acts were in 8th grade (i.e. on average about
14 years old). Life-time prevalence rates would obviously be even greater at
older age levels.
Thornberry et al. report prevalence data that are cumulative over a
full nine waves of data collection in Rochester. Ratios of male gang to non-
gang percentages range from 1.9 for alcohol use to 2.7 for serious violent
acts. Gang girls show even higher violence ratios over non-gang girls. The
raw percentages for serious violence are 80.4 for males and 86.6 for
females. For both sexes, then, engaging in serious violent acts is the
delinquent behaviour that best distinguishes gang from non-gang youth,
more so than less serious violent acts, property crimes, public discord, drug
sales, drug use and alcohol use. In the USA, gang membership begets
violence at levels higher than any other form of delinquency when com-
pared with levels among non-gang youth. This positions us to consider the
comparative violence levels in Europe.
The European delinquency context
Most gang members, especially in the groups studied recently in Europe,
are juveniles or very young adults. It makes sense, then, to assess violence
levels among young European youth generally as a frame for assessing
violence among European gang youth. Such a context is available from the
work in the ISRD programme, which surveyed young people aged 14–21 in
11 European countries (Junger-Tas et al. 1994). The advantage here is that
each country’s report is based upon an almost identical survey instrument.
The violence data we...