This informational document provides a detailed listing of five research-based findings that give insights into the nature, scope, and context of youth delinquency.
In this document, readers will find five research and data-based findings on youth and delinquency that can influence stakeholders’ ability to identify opportunities and develop strategies that support positive youth development through prevention and intervention. The document notes that youth-serving systems’ responses to youth misbehavior can play an important part in promoting or disrupting youths’ healthy social and emotional development. The five insights about youth and delinquency provided in this document are: (1) youth risk-taking is part of the normative developmental process that continues into early adulthood; (2) engagement in offending tends to increase through adolescence, and then decline; (3) only a small percentage of youth are arrested for any crime, and even fewer are arrested for violent crime; (4) youth arrests for violent offences have declined from historic highs in the mid-1990s; and (5) the youth contribution to violent crime arrests is less than that from other age groups, including young adults. The document also provides two graphs with supporting data: one on age-specific arrests in 2020, and the other on youth arrest rate trends from 1980 to 2020.