Cause of Youth Crime

Most of the cities around the world are facing a serious problem in the present, which is the youth crime. Youth crime does not affect only the person who involved but also the victims of the crimes. This will also affect the individuals themselves for their whole life since the crime record will not be eliminated. However, in order to solve the problem, it is necessary to find out the main causes of this problem.

This essay will talk about the causes and effects of the youth crime problem. First of all, the main cause of the youth crime is linked to parental supervision. Parental supervision is very important in order for a teenager to grow up properly and healthily. Based on The Star, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak stated that, “…importance of family institution in steering our young away from trouble, the National Population and Family Development Board has introduced a programme to help the public with parenting skills …” The parents nowadays have to work to pursue financial-well life. They are often not around with their child to give them support when they are needed. This will cause the child to feel being neglected by their parents and then they will try to do things that attract their parent’s attention.

In order to get the attention from the parents, teenagers tend to get involved in the social ills, such as gangsterism, fighting, taking drugs and alcohol and vandalism. Teenager also easily influenced by their peer based on New Zealand Criminal Justice Sector – Outcomes Report June 2008, page 21. They are immature and might imitate each other for the action they assumed that is cool (Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg). Teenagers spend most of their time with friends and this is because the parents nowadays spend longer time to work. Sometime, teenager will act based on the peer pressure. They do not want to feel like being left out by their friends group, so they tend to do whatever their friends do such as smoking, bullying and skipping classes. Otherwise, their friends will look down on them. This phenomenon may lead those teenagers into youth crime.

Media is vital factor that causes the youth crime to happen. We can see that there are many improper advertisements being advertised in newspaper, television, and also magazine. Based on New Straits Times, national vice-chairman of the Malaysia Crime Prevention Foundation (MPCF), Datuk Kamarudin Ali said that, “many students in lower secondary level had fallen from grace upon reaching adolescence, partly due to unsupervised Internet use such as social networking sites, especially Facebook”. All of these may give negative information to the youth. The immature youth would be exposed to more information about crime. The more they are exposed to, the easier they might fall into misleading trap. The curiosity about committing crime in their mind may cause them to make a disastrous mistake as the saying goes, ‘curiosity kills a cat’. Besides, we can see the abundant of youth crime news being reported frequently as the problem of they have low self-control mind-set. They do whatever they want without considering much about the effect of their choices (Laurence Steinberg).

As a conclusion, several factors have led to the increase in youth crime. If the authorities wish to tackle the problem of youth crime, a good approach would be to educate the young more effectively.