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Potential Risk Factors for Serious Delinquency: Findings from Osaka Male Youths

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Crime and Justice in Contemporary Japan

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Abstract

Efforts have been made to identify risk factors for youth offending. Studying dichotomous risk factors has several advantages: they make it easy to interpret interaction effects, to identify individuals with multiple risk factors, and to communicate results to a broader audience. Few English language studies have examined risk factors for Japanese youth offending. The present research is based on 637 male youths in Osaka. The results show that four risk factors are particularly related to delinquency and deviance: low parental monitoring, peer delinquency, high risk-taking, and low achievement. These four potential risk factors are similar to risk factors found in longitudinal studies in the USA and the UK. Implications for the prevention of delinquency in Japan are drawn.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Japanese juvenile delinquency as specified in the Juvenile Law comprises the following: (1) criminal acts by juveniles aged 14 (the minimum age for criminal liability) or over but less than age 20, (2) illegal acts by juveniles under 14 years of age, and (3) predelinquency (deviant acts such as smoking and loitering) by juveniles under 20 years of age (Research and Training Institute of the Ministry of Justice 2000).

  2. 2.

    Promotive factors predict a low probability of offending (Farrington, Loeber, & Ttofi, 2012).

  3. 3.

    The seriousness scale is rated as follows: personal attack, 13.21 (picking a fight with someone, hurting someone in a fight); motor vehicle theft, 6.70 (taking a bicycle/scooter/motorbike for a ride without the owner’s permission); burglary, 6.43 (breaking into a house, store, school, or other building without the owner’s permission); common theft, 5.07 (taking parents’ money without permission); shoplifting, 2.20 (shoplifting); vandalism, 1.80 (drawing graffiti on buildings or other property); public mischief, 0.70 (smoking cigarettes, running away from home, pachinko, staying out somewhere other than home).

  4. 4.

    The categories were scored as none = 1, one to two times = 1, three or more times = 2.

  5. 5.

    Maternal attachment was dropped from the analyses because, conceptually, it did not fit with parental monitoring, yet it was highly correlated with parental monitoring.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank 社会安全研究財団 (Research Foundation for Safe Society) and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for their generous support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Science, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK

    Laura Bui

  2. Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    David P. Farrington

  3. Institute of Advanced Research and Education, Doshisha University, Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan

    Mitsuaki Ueda

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  1. Laura Bui
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  2. David P. Farrington
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Correspondence to Laura Bui .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China

    Jianhong Liu

  2. Hastings College of the Law, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA

    Setsuo Miyazawa

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Bui, L., Farrington, D.P., Ueda, M. (2018). Potential Risk Factors for Serious Delinquency: Findings from Osaka Male Youths. In: Liu, J., Miyazawa, S. (eds) Crime and Justice in Contemporary Japan. Springer Series on Asian Criminology and Criminal Justice Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69359-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69359-0_7

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