Absolute and Relative Involvement in Homicide Offending: Contemporary Youth and the Baby Boom Cohorts

Recent concerns have been expressed that youths are an increasingly violent segment of U.S. society. This report explores such claims by presenting alternative dimensions with which trends in youth violence can be interpreted. Using Uniform Crime Reports and U.S. Bureau of the Census data for 1958-1993, rates of arrests for murder, taken to represent absolute levels of involvement in this form of violence, are analyzed for trends among 15- to 19-year-olds. Relative involvement, operationalized as the ratio of arrest rates for those aged 15-19 to those of the remainder of the population, is also analyzed for trends. A pronounced upward trend since the mid-1980s in both rates and ratios of arrests for murder is found for ages 15-19, resulting in this group now having the highest levels of absolute and relative involvement in murder arrests of any age category, a distinct departure from previous years. As a context for interpreting these levels, the involvement of current 15- to 19-year-olds is shown to exceed by a considerable margin the involvement of similarly aged cohorts of baby boomers, a youth group formerly the object of considerable public concern. Research is encouraged that addresses the multifaceted sources contributing to this dramatic societal shift in age-related patterns of arrests for murder and, by assumption, involvement in homicide offending.