ABSTRACT
Our portrait of young people today omitted an important characteristic of their behaviour that usually stands prominently in the statistics about youth. It concerns crime and the fear of crime. It features regularly and dramatically in speeches by politicians and articles by journalists. Crime figures tend to come in one of two kinds of wrapping. First, there are those data that illustrate long-term trends and are usually presented to show how much worse things are now than they were 50 and-even more remarkably-150 years ago. The second type of data gives us a snapshot of the type and number of crimes committed by a given group within the population. Both approaches are relevant to citizenship education.
