Usual suspects, ideal victims and vice versa: The relationship between youth offending and victimization and the mediating influence of risky lifestyles

Abstract

Objective: The fact that young people report disproportionately high levels of offending has resulted in substantial criminological attention to the topic of young people as offenders. However, we tend to forget that victims of those young delinquents are largely young people as well. Moreover, not only are young people overrepresented in both offender and victim populations, there are equally remarkable similarities between the two populations. Despite the generally accepted homogeneity in victim and offender characteristics and their respective risk factors, little theorydriven empirical research has been conducted in an attempt to further explain this overlap. This study tries to fill this gap by focusing on the relationship between offending and victimization in a large sample of young people in the Brusels Capital Region (N=2070). More specifically, the influence of risky lifestyles on the relationship between offending and victimization is studied in order to test the assumption that the offendingvictimization overlap is in reality the result of the convergence in time and space of (groups of potential) offenders and victims.

Methods: To answer the above query, data from the Youth Monitor Brussels were used. The study was administered in 2010 in secondary schools that are funded by the Flemish community and in which Dutch is therefore the official language. All schools of the Dutch speaking community were asked to participate; more than 70 percent (n = 32) of them agreed to do so. Classes were randomly selected based on grade and type of education; of the pupils in these classes, 88 percent filled in the questionnaire. The non-response rate at the individual level was mainly the result of illness of the respondents or absence of classes owing to a school trip. In sum, N = 2070 adolescents between 13 and 19 years filled in the questionnaire. The analyses conducted to test the research questions are divided into three steps. In a first step, bivariate analyses are presented to identify the overlap between victimization and offending in the data used. Then multivariate analyses are conducted to test these hypotheses. First, regression analyses are conducted with, respectively, ‘offending’ and ‘victimization’ as the dependent variables. Secondly, the relationship between offending, victimization and risky lifestyle is investigated in more depth using structural equation modelling.

Results / Conclusion: The results indicate the validity of the offending–victimization overlap; for each of the offences, respondents reporting offending at least once in the previous year have a higher risk of becoming the victim of that crime in the same period. This relationship was more prominent for crimes against the person, such as physical violence, and drugrelated crimes, than it is for property-related offences. In general this suggests that young people who offend have a higher risk of being victimized, and vice versa. A second aim of this paper was to determine whether a risky lifestyle can explain the overlap between victimization and offending. The lifestyle exposure theory (Hindelang et al., 1978) suggests that the relationship between victimization and offending is in reality spurious, resulting from the fact that offenders and victims share the same lifestyle. Once lifestyle is controlled for, this significant effect would therefore disappear. The results of both the regression analyses and the structural equation models indicate that this assumption is valid as far as the relationship from victimization to offending is concerned. In other words, the original direct effect of victimization on offending is mediated by risky lifestyle. These results are in line with previous studies (Pauwels and Svensson, 2011), which equally found that the victimization–offending relationship was less pronounced than the offending–victimization relationship.