Two of a kind?: a comparative multicohort study of juvenile violence in Finland and Sweden
Youth violence has decreased in many Western countries, including Finland and Sweden, during the 2000s. A worrying deviation from this decline concerns lethal youth violence in the two countries, in particular Sweden, which has experienced a clear increase. In this study, we analyze the extent to wh...
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| Medienart: | Elektronisch Aufsatz |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2025
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| In: |
European journal of criminology
Jahr: 2025, Band: 00, Seiten: 1-26 |
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| Zusammenfassung: | Youth violence has decreased in many Western countries, including Finland and Sweden, during the 2000s. A worrying deviation from this decline concerns lethal youth violence in the two countries, in particular Sweden, which has experienced a clear increase. In this study, we analyze the extent to which this divergence mirrors a concentration of violence whereby fewer and fewer young people are subject to the criminal justice system, but where those who are, are increasingly high-frequent and/or severe offenders. We employ full population longitudinal register data on Finnish and Swedish birth cohorts born between 1986 and 1998 who are followed with conviction data for violent crimes between ages 15 and 20. We disaggregate the trends across these cohorts into criminal career parameters, break down violent crime into specific violent categories, and scrutinize the trends by sociodemographic background variables that are typically associated with violent crime: sex, foreign background, family income, and urban residence. Our findings show that the overall decline in juvenile violent convictions is primarily driven by a declining proportion of violent offenders. This decline is fairly uniform across the examined background variables in both countries. At the same time, this study gives a less optimistic picture of the development within the convicted population of juvenile violent offenders. Convicted juvenile violent offenders born in the late 1990s offend with the same frequency, have a similar debut age of convicted violent crime, but are recorded for more severe offenses as their same-age counterparts born just a decade earlier. Longitudinal data on multiple birth cohorts are needed to understand whether we are seeing more lasting changes in criminal careers, and how these developments look like in comparative terms. |
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| Beschreibung: | Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 23-26 |
| Physische Details: | Illustrationen |
| ISSN: | 1741-2609 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/14773708251335533 |
