Usual suspects,ideal victims and vice versa: The relationship between youth offending and victimization and the mediating influence of risky lifestyles

Abstract

The fact that young people report disproportionately high levels of offending has resulted in substantial criminological attention to the topic of young people as offenders. However, we tend to forget that victims of those young delinquents are largely young people as well. Moreover, not only are young people overrepresented in both offender and victim populations, there are equally remarkable similarities between the two populations. Despite the generally accepted homogeneity in victim and offender characteristics and their respective risk factors, little theory-driven empirical research has been conducted in an attempt to further explain this overlap. This study tries to fill this gap by focusing on the relationship between offending and victimization in a large sample of young people in the Brussels Capital Region (N = 2070). More specifically, the influence of risky lifestyles on the relationship between offending and victimization is studied in order to test the assumption that the offending–victimization overlap is in reality the result of the convergence in time and space of (groups of potential) offenders and victims.