Troubling findings in study on teen crime

A significant number of young Hungarians believe that aggressiveness is a part of life, a study by the National Criminology Institute presented on Tuesday said.

Researcher Csaba Gyory said the study titled "Latent youth deviance" was prepared internationally with 30 countries participating, gauging youth aged 12-15 in the spring of 2006 on youth crime.

Gyory said responses showed that a lot of teenagers believe that "aggression is somehow a way of having fun". He said children reported committing the first minor offence around the age of 12 and that girls were overrepresented among offenders in this age group.

Gyory said the notion of lowering the age of criminal accountability from the current 14 was not the right way to go. Instead, crime prevention should be geared more towards the 12 plus age group, drawing in schools and peer groups as much as possible.

Orsolya Bolyky, who researched substance abuse, said 11-12 percent of students in Hungarian secondary schools have reported experimenting with drugs, while the percentage was as much as 20 percent in vocational schools. However, she said, they did not find a correlation between experimentation and drug addiction in this age group, nor did they find that teens were committing crimes to procure drugs.

Researchers also found that 78.7 percent of young respondents had consumed alcohol, which they interpreted as meaning that the association of alcohol with recreation began among the very young.

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