Abstract
In 1997, Swiss Army recruits were interviewed on the topic of violence. The present study is based on 21,314 anonymous interviews with 20-year-old Swiss men, representing over 70 percent of this birth cohort. After approximately 4 weeks of basic training, the soldiers were asked to complete a questionnaire containing about 900 variables on the biographic and social circumstances of their childhood and adolescence, including violent and other deviant behavior they had either committed or experienced. Apart from those young men whose only offenses are traffic offenses (speeding and drunk driving) or smoking cannabis, we found that most delinquents do not specialize in just one given type of crime. They take whatever is easily available. However, we cannot exclude the possibility of finding clusters of typical forms of delinquency. Among subjects who admitted having perpetrated violent acts towards others, we found 669 who had committed a bodily injury. Among respondents who admitted any sexual harassments or sexual abuse, we found 30 who confessed to having committed rape using threats or violence. Introducing 33 different variables into the models of logistic regression we filtered out those factors, which contribute to the crimes of bodily injury and sexual violence. The crime of bodily injury seems to be most related to three principal causes: lack of self-control, personality disorder, and the access to weapons. Rape seems to be related to some of the same basic factors that influence violence in general. However, sexual victimization during childhood or adolescence is the one most important risk factor in this form of crime. Based on these figures, it seems that empirical evidence supports the following theories on the origins of crime: control theory, psychopathology, situational approach, and biographical trauma theory. On the other hand, we found no support for Sutherland’s theory of differential association, for macro-social theories such as Merton’s functional approach, nor for the labeling approach and critical criminology. The high-quality social welfare, the strong commitment to rehabilitation of the Swiss juvenile justice system, and the relatively fair chances for less privileged juveniles to achieve professional success in a wealthy country may limit the generality of the findings.
Haas, Henriette