A survey by the Swedish Crime Prevention Council (Brå) shows that criminality among the country’s youth is becoming gender-equal, with the same number of girls as boys admitting to committing crimes.
In a survey of ninth-graders (15-year-olds) in 400 primary schools across the country, over half of the students—51.3%— admitted to criminal activity in the past year. The reported criminal activity includes violence, theft, threats, robberies, vandalism, drug crimes, and sexual crimes. The number of criminal boys is only one percentage point above that of girls.
Foreign-born, as well as Swedish-born students with two foreign-born parents, are “slightly” more likely to commit serious violent crimes, serious theft, and drug crimes, the report says.
Looking more closely at the numbers—and remembering this is self-reported—the difference appears to be a bit more than “slight” between immigrant or second-generation immigrant children and children born in Sweden to Swedish parents: While 3.1% of Swedish kids report having committed a serious violent crime, the figures for immigrant children is 6.4% and for second-generation immigrants 6.2%
While the summary published by Brå emphasizes that this is a survey and that speculating about causality is beyond its scope, it points out that a majority of criminal youngsters (73.5%) describe their family as having “weak economic resources.” Almost as strong is the correlation between crime and family makeup: for 68% of kids who admit to breaking the law, their parents have never been together.
45.3% of grade 9 students say that they’ve been victims of at least one crime—such as assault, threat, robbery, sexual crime, or theft—over the past year. The most commonly reported crime was theft, affecting 26.3% of students. This was followed by assault (19.6%), sexual offenses (12.5%), threats (11.9%), and robbery (2.6%). Boys were more likely to be victims of assault while girls were more often victims of sexual crimes. Boys who were sexually assaulted overwhelmingly reported the crimes happening at school during school hours.
Less than one-third of the victims said they had reported the crimes to police.
