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THE SWISS RECRUITS' STUDY 1997 |
Violence and Victimization: A Study of Violent and Sex Offenders Unknown to the Police | ||
Swiss Federal Surveys of Adolescents and Recruits of 1997 (published in 2001)Series ch-x: Vol. 15Due to the general conscription in Switzerland, the survey covered around 70 percent of the Swiss males at age 20. After excluding insincere answers, the database contains 21,314 valid observations. Visit the website of the Swiss Federal Surveys of Adolescents and Recruits ch-x - one of the oldest regularly conducted surveys worldwide! |
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| Are there a substantial number of felons who remain undetected by law enforcement over long periods of time? Do offenders get involved in crime simply because of bad luck or because of mental disorders or other factors? These are just a few of the questions that criminologists often have to answer. A study of 21,347 male army recruits and 1,160 male nonrecruits for comparison purposes was conducted on the topic of violence in 1997. This provided an ideal opportunity for criminologists to examine serious offending. |  | |
| Download the flyer
Direct BBL, Ventes de publications, Fellerstr. 21, CH-3003 Berne Visit the website of Swiss Federal Surveys of Adolescents and Recruits ch-x" |
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| Haas, H. (2004). Doing Research with Large Databases: Opportunities and Challenges of the Swiss Recruits' Study. Online publication that should figure from Nov. 2004 to Nov. 2006 on the homepage of the School of Criminal Science at University of Lausanne according to an agreement with its director of Oct. 27th, 2004. Download the article |
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What about research since then?Recent criminological research, based on new data and multivariate analyses has confirmed the results found in 2001. In Switzerand, it is a study conducted by Manuel Eisner, Denis Ribeaud and Stéphanie Bittel (2006), examining youth violence from a sociological angle. The authors have also stressed the fact, that the origins of violence are closely correlated to the exposion to risk factors early in life.Moreover, they also found that the excess of young immigrants in violence statistics is only due to a confounding covariate, caused by other risk fatcors that you will find in the biography of violent offenders of all cultures (including the Swiss): Youths from immigrand background are on the average more exposed to a series of risk factors in the familily, school, neighborhood as well as individual risks (Eisner, Ribeaud & Bittel, 2006 p.58). "Several comparative studies in different cultures have beeen conducted in the last years in order to analyze what determines conduct problems among youth in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. The findings have shown that the mechanismes generating violence are essentially the same in different cultures (cf. p. ex Jessor, Turbin, Costa, Dong, Zhang et Wang 2003; Orpinas 1999; Vazsonyi, Pickering et Junger 2001)." (Eisner, Ribeaud & Bittel, 2006 p.20). Certain differences between ethnic groups are due to different levels of exposion to these same risks or to a lack of protection to adverse effects of such an exposion. Now that the predominance of biographical factors, going back deep into early age and even pregnancy over other factors related to social circumstances at young adult age, is established, measures of crime prevention must be based on scientific evidence. |
To know more ... Eisner M., Ribeaud D. & Bittel St. (2006). Voies vers une politique de prévention fondée sur l'évidence scientifique. Commission fédérale des étrangers (Eds). |
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