Why do differences between age groups exist?

• Status Frustration

  • A peer group can give individuals some support when it comes to identity or status, and can sometimes be more important than family for teenagers. 
  • However a peer group may influence individuals to take part in minor acts of deviance and crime which they may not have done on their own without peer pressure.
• Status Frustration

  • Cohen argues that young people have status frustration because of their lack of independent status in society, this tends to be during the transition between child and adults. 
  • As young people don’t have many responsibilities they then try to search for excitement and they tend to get this from deviant and criminal behaviour. 
• Social Class

  Walter Miller suggests that young males in the lower working class are more likely to engage in criminal activity than females or middle class males. This is because their subcultures have characteristics which leads them to law breaking. This came from:

  • Toughness and masculinity
  • Smartness
  • Excitement and thrills
  • Fatalism (feeling like they can only do little i their lives)
  • Trouble 

  He suggested that these get shared by lots of males in the lower working class for all ages but it is more likely for younger people as they seek peer group status.
• Edgework

  • Young men and an increasing number of young women look for thrills in society today. 
  • Criminal activity is motivated by edgework instead of material gain. 
  • Individuals enjoy the excitement of living on the edge with acts such as shoplifting and fighting and are not worried about being caught. 
  • Peer groups can give support and encouragement for criminal activities, and having a group of people helps to increase the chance of someone getting away with criminal activity. 
• Edgework - any type of behaviour that is at the edge of what is accepted and allowed, such as stealing or racing a car. It tends to be risky behaviour.
• Socialisation

  • Some young people don’t have the proper primary or secondary socialisation, or they could have learned the criminal norms and values if they have criminal role models. 
  • If someone is exposed to crime at a young age they may continue it for the rest of their life. 
  • This can be seen as most adults that commit offences commit their first crimes when they are young.
• Police Stereotyping

  • Police stereotype young people in society as the source of problems which means that they then spend more time observing and checking young people. 
  • This then leads to more of them being caught and defined as offenders which means that they will appear in statistics more which then gives that group/quota of people a stereotype/they have been labelled so the police will look out for them more.
• Subcultures

  • Individuals may grow up in an anti-subculture but then grow out of it and leave that subculture because they don’t like how they are being pressured into committing crimes or doing things that they don’t believe are correct, so they would then try to avoid this when they are older.
• Subcultures

  • Younger people are more likely to be a part of an anti-subculture which can then pressure them into committing crimes when normally they wouldn’t. 
  • The older that an individual is the less likely it is that they are going to be pressured into committing crimes as their subcultures norms and values are more likely to be based off of things that suit everyone in the group and not just the few that go against the law.