Children’s experiences of crime in Britain survey

This project will provide the most comprehensive Britain-wide survey to date of youth offending and victimisation, including in the online domain.

Most offending by and against young people is never dealt with by the youth justice system, so examining self-reported criminal behaviour is an important way of examining its nature and drivers. Previous research on youth crime has largely focused on either offending or being victimised, but this study will focus on the overlap between the two, which has recently emerged as an important area of study and intervention. The same individuals will often both take part in and experience problematic behaviour: they may be best considered as neither ‘offenders’ nor ‘victims’ but inhabitants of particularly harmful environments, frequently with co-occurring problems such as substance abuse and residential instability. The search for effective interventions requires an understanding of this correlation. Research to date has not kept pace with the expansion of online offending and victimisation, nor has it explored the overlap between online and offline behaviour. This new survey will be part of the established International Self-Report Study of Delinquency (ISRD), enabling comparison with contemporaneous results from over thirty countries. As well as examining the co-occurrence of offending and victimisation, the study will test theories around the role of values and moral beliefs, ‘routine activities’ and risky environments, and characteristics such as self-control.

The project will begin with a rapid review of literature on the overlap between offending and victimisation, and on offending and victimisation taking place online. A survey sample of 2,700 pupils will be drawn from schools and Pupil Referral Units in both urban and rural areas in England, Scotland and Wales. The age range of 13 to 17 has been selected to reflect the peak rates of offending and victimisation. As well as questions relating to a broad range of behaviours, activities and attitudes, the survey will include specific questions about key types of cybercrime such as hacking, phishing, image-based sexual offences and hate speech. It will include some questions on key contemporary topics such as the COVID-19 lockdown and Black Lives Matter. An additional sample of 16- to 17-year-olds will be recruited through targeted messages on Facebook and internet discussion groups to capture those not in education. Lifetime prevalence, past-year prevalence and past-year incidence will be reported for key types of offending and victimisation, with bivariate techniques used to explore overlaps and multivariate models used to identify causal relationships, risk factors and protective factors.

This analysis will provide important evidence to inform the development of better interventions for children as offenders and/or victims, as well as helping to build the knowledge base around online offending and victimisation and their relationship with offline experiences and behaviour. Findings will be disseminated in free public reports, academic conferences and journals, podcasts, summaries for policymakers and practitioners, and targeted summaries for schoolchildren, parents and further and higher education students.