NCJ Number
192866
Journal
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention Volume: 2 Issue: 1 Dated: 2001 Pages: 50-71
Date Published
2001
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This study examined the trends in homicide in Finland and Estonia from 1880 through 1940 and considered the factors that influenced these trends.
Abstract
The analysis revealed that homicide rates increased considerably in Finland and Estonia during the period of industrialization, whereas they reached their all-time low in Europe and Scandinavia during the same period. The rapid growth of criminal violence during the late 1800’s and the first half of the 1900’s in these two countries seemed to have resulted from interaction of several factors that were partly non-simultaneous and unrelated. Among the basic factors were the quick social and economic changes following industrialization, plus the modernization of agriculture and the pressures it put on youth in the form of uncertain prospects for the future and a new set of values oriented to competition. A connected factor was the authoritarian political system of the Russian Empire, which prevented necessary political reforms and left behind a legacy of social thinking that idealized violence as a political and social instrument. This legacy affected large parts of Finnish and Estonian populations long after the Czarist system was gone. However, the criminal violence on the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland differed significantly from that on the southern coast. The violence in Finland occurred in the new forest industrial communities. In contrast, in Estonia, the violence centered among the landless population of the countryside. Figures, tables, footnotes, and 60 references (Author abstract modified)