Juvenile Crime and Bullying

The prevalence of juvenile delinquency has the capacity to not only garner public attention but mobile resources in the war on crime. Driven in part by a perennial fear of youth, successive generations seem to rediscover the delinquency problem, redefine it at epidemic levels, and invest significant resources to fix the problem. The challenge, however, is that conclusions about the prevalence of delinquency is hampered by limitations in available data. This chapter will describe the primary ways of measuring juvenile delinquency and address their limitations. The chapter will address how society\u27s emotional and political responses to juvenile delinquency present challenges when interpreting data sources both between communities and across time. Special emphasis is given to the contemporary problem of bullying, a dimension of juvenile delinquency, which has been recognized as a contemporary problem among young people. Policymakers are encouraged to consider a broad cross-section of crime measures when drawing conclusions about trends in delinquency, and also to recognize that changes in laws and how laws are enforced can impact data in important ways