Applying Dickey-Fuller time series techniques in tandem with intuitive plot-displays, we examine recent trends in girls' violence and the gender gap as reported in four major sources of longitudinal data on youth violence. These sources are arrest statistics of the Uniform Crime Reports,victimization data of the National Crime Victimization Survey (where the victim identifies sex of offender) and self-reported violent behavior of Monitoring the Future and National Youth Risk Behavior Survey. We find that the rise in girls' violence over the past one to two decades as counted in police arrest data from the Uniform Crime Reports is not borne out in unofficial longitudinal sources. Several net-widening policy shifts have apparently escalated girls' arrest-proneness: first, stretching definitions of violence to include more minor incidents that girls in relative terms are more likely to commit; second, increased policing of violence between intimates and in private settings (for example, home, school) where girls' violence is more widespread; and, third, less tolerant family and societal attitudes toward juvenile females. These developments reflect both a growing intolerance

The authors examine 1980 to 2003 trends in female-to-male interpersonal violence reported in Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) arrest statistics and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) victimization data. Augmented Dickey-Fuller time-series techniques and intuitive plot displays show much overlap yet differences in each source's portrayal of trends in female violence levels and the gender gap. Both sources show little or no change in the gender gap for homicide and rape/sexual assault, whereas UCR police counts show a sharp rise in female-to-male arrests for criminal assault during the past one to two decades-but that rise is not borne out in NCVS counts. Net-widening policy shifts have apparently escalated the arrest proneness of females for "criminal assault" (e.g., policing physical attacks/threats of marginal seriousness that women in relative terms are more likely to commit); rather than women having become any more violent, official data increasingly mask differences in violent offending by men and women.

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Although classical theorists tend to believe that immigrant youth are more delinquent than native-born adolescents, the existing empirical studies have shown the opposite. The current paper first gives a comprehensive overview of major theoretical explanations for the relatively lower level of delinquency among immigrant youth, including cultural perspectives, strain theories, social control theory, social learning theory, and social disorganization theory. The main argument is that immigrant youth who have not yet acculturated to the youth subculture of the host society are more law-abiding due to protections from their traditional traits (i.e., being more realistic, stronger ties with family/schools, less access to delinquent friends, and higher level of collective efficacy in homogeneous neighborhoods). All these theories are also applied to explain the generational differences in terms of delinquency: compared to earlier generations, later generations of immigrant youth are often more delinquent because they are more acculturated and the protective factors from their origins wear off over time. The continuing public and political bias toward immigrant youth has been explained by social constructionists. We further discuss the necessity of a synthesis of these theoretical approaches and the importance to examine both internal and international migration under similar theoretical frameworks in the modern era.

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Current empirical and theoretical understanding of the relation between age and crime is based almost entirely on data from the United States and a few prototypical Western societies for which age‐specific crime information across offense types is available. By using Western databases, Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983) projected that the age distribution of crime is always and everywhere robustly right‐skewed (i.e., sharp adolescent peak)—a thesis that is both contested and widely accepted in criminology and social science writings. In the study described here, we tested this age–crime invariance thesis by comparing age–crime patterns in Taiwan (a non‐Western Chinese society) with those in the United States. In light of Taiwan's collectivist culture versus the U.S. individualist gestalt, we anticipated more divergence than homogeneity in their age–crime schedules. Our findings show robust divergence in Taiwan's age–crime patterns compared with U.S. patterns and the reverted J‐shaped norm projected by Hirschi and Gottfredson. Implications for research and theory on the age–crime relation and for studying human development or life‐course topics more broadly are discussed.

In high-density cities around the world, alleys are common but neglected spaces that are perceived as unsafe. While cities have invested resources in environmental interventions to improve safety in urban allies, it is not clear how these interventions impact perceived safety. We review two important criminology theories that discuss the environmental and social factors that lead to crime: the Broken Windows Theory and the Routine Activity Theory. We argue that these theories can also be used to explain safety perceptions of urban environments, and then develop urban alley interventions based on these theories. We test people's perceived safety of these interventions through a photograph survey. Results show that all interventions yielded higher perceived safety than existing alley scenes. Interventions based on the Broken Windows Theory (cleaning or vegetation interventions) yielded only modest improvements in perceived safety, while interventions based on the Routine Activity Theory (urban function interventions) yielded higher ratings. Our findings question the dominant use of the Broken Windows Theory in environmental interventions to promote perceived safety and argue for a more effective approach: urban function interventions inspired by the Routine Activity Theory.

This examination of minor and serious delinquency among eighth graders in a large southern Chinese city, Guangzhou, also compared groups of these students, observing differences between the delinquency of migrants and that of urban natives. Data used were originally collected for the study "Stuck in the City: Migration and Delinquency Among Migrant Adolescents in Guangzhou." The present study asked whether and how various sources of strain and social control factors explained students' delinquency, questioning how meaningfully migration status moderated several of the observed delinquency relationships. Of students in the sample, 741 reported being natives of Guangzhou, and 497 reported migrating to Guangzhou from a rural area. The study conceptualized internal migration as a strain factor leading to delinquency, but the analyses did not suggest direct association between internal migration and delinquency. Results generally supported Agnew's theory, and, what's more, they tended to confirm that migration status moderated juvenile delinquency.