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Teenagers’ Perceptions of Legitimacy and Preparedness to Break the Law: The Impact of Migrant and Ethnic Minority Status

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Minority Youth and Social Integration

Abstract

Much comparative research has charted the difficult relationships that often develop between the police and people with migrant backgrounds, especially those from minority ethnic groups. However there is very little research into the ways in which these issues play out with young teenagers. This chapter first examines the relationships between migrant status and variables relevant to procedural justice theory (mainly perceptions of procedural fairness and of legitimacy) and self-reported crime, amongst the countries that form the UPYC sub-project of the International Self-Report Delinquency Study: France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK (disaggregated here into English and Scottish sub-samples) and the US. In four out of the six countries and in the analyses combining all six countries, migration has an effect consistent with most previous studies, namely migrants confer less trust and legitimacy on the police. The second part of the paper examines factors that appear to mediate these effects. Living in conditions of disadvantage and in disorganised neighbourhoods explains almost completely the correlation that we observe between migrant status and perceptions of legitimacy. In the third and final part of the paper we look deeper into the effect of migration on trust, legitimacy and self-reported offending by also incorporating ethnic minority status into the analysis. It is shown that minority status is the main driver of the effects apparently associated with migrant status. These results are interpreted in terms of the histories of integration—or of failed integration—of migrants from visible ethnic minorities into the host population. Implications for public policy and social science are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    PJ theory has been theorized in many flavours. We follow the perspective of Jackson and colleagues (Hough et al., 2013; Jackson et al., 2011) according to which the main elements of PJ theory are trust, legitimacy and compliance. Trust is shaped by three dimensions: perceptions of procedural fairness, distributive fairness and police effectiveness. Legitimacy is also shaped by three dimensions: obligation to obey, moral alignment and lawfulness.

  2. 2.

    We are grateful to the five funding councils, who made the award under the Open Research Area programme. The authors’ institutions were supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG): EN 490/1-1 and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC): ES/L016656/1).

  3. 3.

    Hüttermann (2003) shows that police officers may adapt their policing style to the situation and identifies two styles: a symbolic one, which is concerned mainly with delivering a protective presence, and the ‘street corner’ one, which represents a more interventionist policing style. It can be expected that policing in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods will be more often of the second kind.

  4. 4.

    Attitudes amongst members of the same social group will vary less (i.e. will be more determined by their group membership) the more the individuals identify with that group and the stronger the group conflict (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).

  5. 5.

    Time since immigration is important according to social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), because an individual’s behaviour will be more or less determined by their group membership depending on the intensity of their identification with the group. We do not have a measure of intensity of identification so we make the assumption that the identification with the group (and its conflicts with other groups) increases with time, especially when there is a history of rejection from the superordinate group.

  6. 6.

    Weitzer (2010) argues that a valid analysis of group conflicts should differentiate between the ethnic minorities of particular relevance in a given country. So, for example, in the USA, blacks and Hispanic are relevant groups, but with different migration histories, and should be kept separated in the analysis. Probably in Germany Turks would be an important ethnic minority to separate from others. Because of data limitations and to keep groups the same within countries, we simply differentiate amongst migrants between visible ethnic minorities and other minorities. We also include time since migration in terms of migration generation.

  7. 7.

    Note that the values of the answer categories for this scale have been inverted.

  8. 8.

    With two exceptions: in the USA this is not the case and in Scotland the direction of this effect is reversed.

  9. 9.

    In the cases of England and Scotland, people being born in any region of the UK are considered natives.

  10. 10.

    There are some exceptions to this rule. Cases not categorized at all or with no valid answer in Question 10 could become majority after checking the information about the place of birth of the parents.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Criminology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Diego Farren

  2. Emeritus Professor, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Mike Hough

Authors
  1. Diego Farren
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), PACTE, Sciences-Po/Grenoble-Alpes University, Grenoble, France

    Sebastian Roché

  2. School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Mike Hough

Appendix: Variables Measuring Migrant and Ethnic Minority Status

Appendix: Variables Measuring Migrant and Ethnic Minority Status

The variables used to measure migrant and ethnic minority status reflect choices we made to achieve the ‘least worst’ measures, bearing in mind that the place of birth is only a proxy for migrant status and that the question on minority ethnic status was asked in different ways in different countries. (Variations in the question on ethnicity were unavoidable, given variations across countries both in the ethical norms about questions on ethnicity and in substantive differences in the ethnic compositions of each country’s population.)

Migrant Status

The migration variable relies mainly on items asking about the country of birth of the pupil and parents. If at least one parent was born outside the survey country, the pupil is classified as a migrant.Footnote 9 We further distinguish between first- and second-generation migrants: first-generation migrants are those who were (a) born abroad and (b) had at least one parent born abroad. Other pupils with one or more parents born abroad are second-generation migrants.

A small proportion of those we define as having migrant status will be misclassified—such as those from families with multi-generation histories of working abroad, for example, on military service. There is also a case for defining pupils as having a migrant background if their grandparents migrated—but the necessary data were not collected.

Ethnic Minority Status

The ethnic minority variable is constructed mainly from Question 10 in the questionnaire, which was tailored to each country’s needs. Table 9.8 shows question wording in the UPYC countries.

Table 9.8 Ethnic minority questions
Full size table

Information about parents’ country of birth was also used to fine-tune Question 10 or to decide whether to define a case as minority or not when the answer given to Question 10 was inconclusive. In this second step in the construction of the minority variable, only cases initially defined as majority could be redefined as minority.Footnote 10 The general rule is as follows: anyone who has been classified as majority (or has not been classified) and has at least one parent being born in a ‘minority country’, becomes a minority himself. The rules to define someone as minority or majority are presented in Table 9.9.

Table 9.9 Categories assigned as minority or majority in the different countries
Full size table

The ethnic minority variable is intended to differentiate between white and non-white respondents in order to look at racial aspects of migration (e.g. racial profiling). For this reason, countries having a majority non-white population are declared as ‘minority countries’. The countries found in the answers about parents’ birth country that were defined as ‘minority countries’, are:

  • Arab Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia

  • Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kurdistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates

  • Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kashmir, Korea, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam

  • Africa: Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Congo, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mayotte, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Togo, Zambia, Zimbabwe

  • Caribbean: Bahamas, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname

  • French colonies: French Overseas Territories, Guadalupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Reunion, Mayotte

  • Dutch colonies: Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao

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Farren, D., Hough, M. (2018). Teenagers’ Perceptions of Legitimacy and Preparedness to Break the Law: The Impact of Migrant and Ethnic Minority Status. In: Roché, S., Hough, M. (eds) Minority Youth and Social Integration. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89462-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89462-1_9

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