Criminology Research Council grant ; (21/81)
This project resulted in the publication by the Victorian Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (VACRO) of a book Detected Young Offenders, by D. Challinger in 1985.
The study was based on an analysis of police documents relating to 15 294 official contacts by the police with 13 079 individual youngsters. It is recognised that only a small percentage of youngsters who commit offences are formally dealt with by the police. While official statistics relating to youthful offending in Victoria appear to be levelling out, numbers of - young offenders are still being dealt with by parents, teachers or retailers without police being involved in any formal capacity.
Notwithstanding that, just over 80 per cent of youthful offending dealt with by the police is found to be property oriented. Most notably, 46 per cent of offences relate to theft, with one third of s offences comprising thefts from shops. Burglaries account for 18.5 per cent and car theft for another 8 per cent, but offences against persons (assaults, robberies and sex offences) account for only 3.9 per cent. At the other end of the spectrum, road traffic offences account for 8 per cent with offences relating to mini-bike riding constituting the bulk of them.
Close examination of the police documents reveals that many offences are actually fairly minor in nature, some number of the assaults being described as scuffles, and some robberies involving children threatening others and making off with small amounts of money. However, there are still quite serious instances of each of these offences committed by young people. Vandalism offences provide a good example of the way in which a legal label obscures a variety of events. In this study such offences included causing $3 damage to a letterbox with a brick, causing $10,000 worth of damage to a building under construction, and incinerating a railway carriage worth $200 000.
The study provides a number of general statistics about officially detected offenders and some of the more interesting are listed here. Their average age is 14.6 years, although 16-year-old boys constitute the single largest group.
One-quarter of the individual offenders were girls compared with only 20 per cent in 1972. But over three-quarters of the girls come to police attention for stealing from shops compared with only 23 per cent of the boys, indicating an obvious difference in offending patterns for the sexes. Almost two-thirds of all offenders committed their offences in company with other youngsters and three-quarters of them had not previously come to the attention of the police. While some countries (e.g. England, New Zealand, Greece and Turkey) appear over-represented amongst the birthplaces of offenders, Australian-born children of Australian parents seemed to be more likely to re-offend in the 12month period. By contrast Australian-born children of Italian or Greek parents tend not to return to police attention. The majority of offenders were, or had been, students at Government schools, with technical school students being over-represented and private school students being under-represented. The young unemployed appear more likely than the other school-leavers who have jobs, to come to formal police attention. Single mother families account for 18 per cent of offenders' home situations and this constitutes an over-representation. Working mothers are also over-represented in offenders' families, although offenders from such families do appear less likely to return to police attention. In 80 per cent of cases police describe offenders' parents as 'very interested' in their children irrespective of both family composition and the fact that a quarter of the offenders' families have experienced marital breakdown.
Just under two-thirds of the offences ended with an official police caution, continuing the recent trend to use this method rather than a Children's Court appearance for dealing with young offenders.
Cautioning rates are higher for thefts and females but have been increasing for all offences. At the Children's Court there is an indication that offenders are being more rigorously treated than, say, ten years ago, although only 3.5 per cent of all contacts concluded with an offender being sentenced to a Youth Training Centre. The average sentence was 6.4 months.