This paper details perspectives of skateboarders on the utility and functionality of skate-parks in Western Australia. To this end, skateboarder interview data and skate-park audit data are triangulated in a mixed-method research design. The study's findings reveal that skateboarders believe adults view them as being anti-social deviant youth and their leisure pursuit of skateboarding as an undesirable pastime that requires regulation. Skateboarders also contend that as urban skate-parks double up as youth hang-out spaces, vocal adult opponents of skate-park builds often petition for them to be situated in places that do not offend public sensibilities. It is hypothesized that this social marginalization of skateboarders within the community underpins the current poor provisioning of skateboarding facilities.
The research reported investigated differences in the forms of delinquent activities and the reputational orientations of at risk and not at risk male and female adolescents. Initially, we sought to establish that adolescent males and females were different in these aspects. This was found to be the case with multivariate analyses of variance revealing that males (n = 722) scored significantly higher than females (n = 738) on seven self-reported delinquency variables and on eight reputation enhancement variables pertaining to social deviance, nonconforming reputation, and power/evaluation private identity. When a sample of 31 at risk females was subsequently pair wise age matched with 31 not at risk females, it was found that apart from school misdemeanours, at risk females scored significantly higher on all six other delinquency variables. These at risk females also scored significantly higher on four reputation enhancement variables relating to social deviance and nonconformity. Given that at risk females did not differ to their not at risk counterparts in their level of involvement in school misdemeanors, we sought to determine whether this was also the case for at risk and not at risk males. An age matched sample of 91 pairs revealed that at risk males reported significantly higher involvement than not at risk males in all aspects of delinquency, including school misdemeanors. They also sought a more non-conforming reputation. To explore the relationships between delinquency and reputation enhancement a Canonical Correlation Analysis was performed. All findings are discussed in the light of reputation enhancement theory.Acknowledgement: This research was partly funded by the Australian Research Council
While graffiti is a gateway crime towards more serious criminal offending, little is known about graffitists' patterns of desistance from, and persistence in, crime. This paper addresses this knowledge shortfall through an examination of the Western Australian Police Information Management System (IMS) database for three age-groups (i.e. preteens, adolescents, adults) and three categories of graffiti offenders (Early Desisters, Limited Persisters, Chronic Persisters). Descriptive and chi-squared statistics reveal that: i) nearly three-quarters of all of the 667 preteen, adolescent and adult graffiti offenders desisted from further offending after their first or second contact with police; ii) the mainly adolescent cohort of Limited Persister offenders account for the majority of all recorded violent crime; and c) most graffiti offenders are processed through the court system for both their graffiti and non-graffitirelated offences. The implications for designing recidivist intervention programmes that target offenders at the different stages of their offending are discussed.
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