Citation

Zimring FE. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 2004; 1036: 290-299.

Affiliation

University of California at Berkely, School of Law, 383 Boalt Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. zimring@law.berkeley.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1196/annals.1330.010

PMID

15817745

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to derive lessons about high-lethality adolescent violence from study of the extraordinary increase, and then decrease, in youth homicide arrests over the period 1985-2001 in the United States. This effort continues a long tradition of exploring the possible causes of shifts in homicide rates by examining patterns of violence to see whether there are important changes in types of violence. The first section of the paper discusses two dimensions of criminal youth violence over the whole range of reported offenses. The second section shows that one subset of attacks-firearms cases-accounts for the major changes in youth homicide when it increased from 1985-1993 and during the years of decrease, 1994-2001. A third section explores the linkage between rates of adolescent homicide in various cultures and the relative rate of homicide among all ages. My central conclusion is that high-lethality violence among youth is not representative of the fighting and group assaults that are relatively frequent among adolescents. Instead, the attacks that often lead to death differ with respect to the use of weapons and, to some extent, geography. But there is usually a strong relationship between homicide rates for all ages and youth homicide rates in a particular location.