Director NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research

the results of a survey of self-reported offending among a sample of over 5,000 secondary school students in New South Wales. The survey, the first of its kind in Australia, revealed surprisingly high levels of juvenile involvement in crime. The annual self-reported rate of assault, for example, was nearly 30 per cent. Those who followed media coverage of the survey at the time would have noticed that that the results caused some consternation (see, for example, Cooke and Murphy 1998). Some of the concern was perhaps to be expected given the proximity of the NSW State election. But youth advocates who normally praise criminological research for its myth-busting role in public debate about law and order policy could also be heard criticising the survey results as misleading and improbable. And yet the results of our study should not have come as a surprise. The prevalence figures were consistent with figures obtained from other similar surveys obtained in the United States and Britain (Blumstein, Cohen, Roth and Visher 1986, pp-242-243, Graham and Bowling 1985). They were obtained by a well-tested methodology (Hindelang, Hirschi and Weis 1981). They are consistent with our best estimates of the incidence of crime in New South Wales (Crime and Safety: New South Wales 1997)