The Relationship Between Age & Crime (AQA GCSE Sociology)

Official statistics on age & crime

• There is a link between age and offending behaviour, with young people (especially males) being more likely to engage in criminal activity than older people

• Young people who do engage in crime tend to commit relatively minor offences, such as theft and handling stolen goods

• According to the Youth Justice Board (2024), between April 2022 and March 2023:

  • stop and searches of children (10-17 years) increased by 13% and accounted for over one in five of the total stop and searches

  • arrests of children increased by 9% compared with the previous year

• Young people are more likely to reoffend compared to adults (Ministry of Justice, 2022)

Explanations for the link between age & crime

Excitement

• Young people are more likely to engage in crime and deviance as they seek excitement

• The experience of rule-breaking is attractive to young people

  • It is exciting and causes an adrenaline rush

Inadequate socialisation

• Functionalist theories argue that children who fail to learn society's norms and values are likely to engage in crime and deviance from a young age

• Ineffective primary socialisation is due to poor quality parenting, which leads to crime:

  • parents don't take responsibility for their children's upbringing

  • parents don't supervise their children

  • some children grow up in fatherless families.

• Other agencies of socialisation (schools, religion and mass media) also fail to socialise children into society's norms and values because:

  • schools fail to discipline children

  • the influence of religious values is declining

  • mass media (the film and music industry) glamorises gun crime and violence

• Therefore, there is a breakdown in the social control of some young people at home and school

• This view is supported by the New Right perspective (Murray, 1998), which believes that

  • inadequate socialisation of the underclass leads to criminal behaviour

  • families without fathers lack strong male role models so young people find them in inappropriate places

Key thinker: Cohen's (1955) subcultural theory

• The values of a specific subculture are used by subcultural theory to explain both adult and juvenile delinquency

• Functionalist Cohen (1995) studied juvenile delinquency among working-class boys in North America and found that:

  • juvenile delinquency is more of a group issue than an individual issue

  • young males learn to become delinquent by joining groups or gangs where delinquency already exists

  • being part of a delinquent subculture is a way of life for boys in urban neighbourhoods in large cities

  • delinquent acts carried out by the boys included stealing, vandalism, violence and truancy

Explanations for juvenile delinquency

• Cohen argues that working-class boys hold the same success goals as wider society, but they don't achieve them because of

  • educational failure and poor employment prospects caused by cultural deprivation

    • This is because schools are middle-class institutions due to their values and expectations, which disadvantage working-class boys

• Cohen argues that because of the lack of opportunity and low social standing, the boys suffer from status frustration

• They turn to criminality as an alternative route to success, becoming members of a criminal subculture

• This way they gain status and acceptance within their group (i.e. boys in a similar social position)

• They also hit back at the school system that has labelled them as failures

Criticisms of Cohen's theory

• Cohen's work shows a middle-class bias

  • He assumes working-class delinquents initially accept middle-class values and aspirations such as educational success

  • Some argue that the boys' delinquent behaviour is out of resentment against teachers and successful middle-class students

• Critics argue that those who commit criminal and deviant behaviour never had the same norms and values as the rest of society

  • Their primary socialisation led to the development of deviant and/or criminal norms

  • Once these deviant and criminal norms are accepted, they are difficult to break, especially if they result in a criminal record

• Cohen is criticised by feminists for ignoring girls in his research, which prevents his explanation from being generalised to the whole population

• Interactionists argue that many people commit criminal acts but only some people are caught and labelled for it (e.g. young people)