The phenomenon of youth crime has a very strong impact on public opinion not only in Europe, but worldwide.
Youth crime is one of those problems that arouse a lot of concern at the social level, so much so as to speak of a real emergency. Probably, this strong concern is due to the fact that this particular phenomenon involves a large number of young adolescents who, for one reason or another, often find themselves embarking on a life path characterized by delinquency.
Although the percentage of young people who commit criminal acts is quite high, researchers have great difficulty in clarifying why young people adopt deviant and criminal behavior. As a result, it is very difficult to understand how and why the phenomenon of youth crime has spread like wildfire in today's societies. Among other things, recent studies conducted on the phenomenon have highlighted an important aspect, namely that young criminals do not only belong to disadvantaged and problematic families as was thought in the past, but often to wealthy families as well.
The phenomenon of youth crime manifests itself in different forms: among the most frequent are certainly thefts, robberies, vandalism and violence against people. However, the causes that push young people to act in this way are still unknown. What is certain is that crime is a phenomenon closely linked to the sociological concept of deviance, which has to do mainly with the behavior adopted by individuals, a behavior that departs from social norms and violates the sensitivity of members belonging to a particular social group who share specific rules and values.
Starting from these considerations, in the first part of this master thesis work I decided to enclose all the theoretical background.
The first chapter is dedicated to the concept of deviance and aims to offer a general theoretical framework of the phenomenon. The purpose is to start from the sociological concept of deviance to get to the more specific concept of crime, also providing an adequate explanation of the difference between these two concepts.
In the second chapter I will talk, instead, about the theories of deviance and crime, while in the third chapter I will focus mainly on the study of deviance and crime and the main characteristics of offenders.
The second part of this master thesis work is dedicated to case study. I will present the QCA comparative analysis that I conducted on 23 European countries with respect to the chosen investigation phenomenon: youth crime.
The case study aims to provide a modest generalization of the phenomenon of youth crime through the qualitative comparative analysis, carried out by comparing different European countries with respect to the consideration of some specific conditions.
The main objective of this case study is to investigate the factors that may or may not influence youth crime, its origin and development.
Therefore, in the second part of this master thesis, a model will be developed to relate the phenomenon of youth crime with some social and economic factors of the European countries considered for the analysis. In this regard, it should be stressed that in this context and for this analysis, the general factors will be treated as specific conditions.
Factors such as the educational system, secularization, safety and GDP of European countries are just some of the many conditions that, in my opinion, have to be considered to investigate the emergence and affirmation of criminal behavior by young people.
Therefore, in the case study will be made a comparison between the different European countries on the phenomenon of youth crime starting from the formulation of accurate hypotheses, which have a broad theoretical background and that, for this reason, serve as a support to the work presented here.
The analysis carried out is very selective. It privileges the deepening of some crucial issues closely related to youth crime in Europe with the aim of arriving at a thrifty explanation of the phenomenon.
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