The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of violent juvenile crime. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the disposition of youth crime in the justice system has become relevant and then to discuss key issues in the debate, with a view toward identifying ways of resolving the difficulties of making appropriate decisions in individual cases.
Controversy has long surrounded the ethical issue of violent juvenile delinquency as a social problem, and how it should be addressed. Its causes, the shape that it assumes, and the question of how to solve the problems that it creates for both offenders and their victims have vexed social theory for decades. Curiously, however, despite clinical research into the subject, there is no single agreed-upon unifying theory of social analysis or child behavior that can account for the phenomenon of crime and delinquency perpetrated by youth (Whitehead & Lab, 1990). To be sure, there is a view that "developmental arguments have proved much more useful in treatment of deviant individuals" (p. 91), which is aimed at understanding and perhaps intervening in prospective causes of violent juvenile behavior. Thus the disagreements over social theories that can explain criminal youth violence are likely to continue.
What are difficult to refute, irrespective of the causes and the theories that might explain it, are the statistics of youth crime. According to a the FBI Violent Crime Index, "person offenses"--assault, rape, robbery, and homicide--accounted for 23% of all juvenile cases in 1999, the last year for which figures were found. That source also reported other troubling figures with respect to the characteristics of violent youthful offenders:
Compared with 1990, juveniles involved in person offense cases in 1999 were slightly younger and more likely to be female. In 1999, 64% of person offense cases involved juveniles younger than 16 years old, compared w...