Citizenship at key stage 3 (Year 7-9)
Unit 02: Crime
Section 3: What are criminal offences? What causes people to commit crimes? (3)
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Objectives |
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- that offending can be age-related
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Activities |
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Outcomes |
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Children: |
- Use a graph to show pupils that criminal activity peaks at the age of 18 for males and at the age of 15 for females, dropping rapidly after that. Discuss possible reasons for the trends, relating the figures to the pupils' own experience. Ask pupils to consider why crime committed by young women is on the increase, while crime committed by young men is fairly stable. What can, or should, be done about it?
- Pupils consider statistics relating to the types of crimes young people commit, eg 66 per cent of crimes committed by 18-year-old males are property crimes, while 10 per cent are violent crimes and 10 per cent are drug-related crimes.Discuss the relative seriousness of these offences for the victim(s), the perpetrator and society as a whole.
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- discuss and identify factors leading to youth offending
- understand the concept of the 'peak age of offending'
- extract data from graphs and discuss crime statistics in relation to causal factors
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Points to note |
- Crime statistics are published annually by the Home Office in Criminal statistics, England and Wales available in reference libraries and from The Stationery Office, and in Social trends and key data on adolescence, published by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence, www.tsa.uk.com.
- Link with mathematics: Ma4.3b, 4a, 5a, 5c, 5d.
- Link with thinking skills: Information processing.
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This unit is divided into sections. Each section contains a sequence of
activities with related objectives and outcomes. You can view this unit by
moving through the sections or print/download the whole unit.
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