[Attitude and social reaction of a sample of young people with regard to some types of criminal behavior].

Abstract

The object of the present study is the analysis of how certain types of delinquent behaviour are noted by a group of young people, aged between 14 and 18 years, resident in the Milan area. Under the methodological profile a questionaire was made up including various hypotheses of behaviour of a criminal nature which those interviewed were asked to comment on not only on the level of mere approval/disapproval but also on the level of the attitude they considered it would be best to assume towards the hypothetical author of the crime. A clear homogeneity in the answers was found only on the level of the reaction of approval/disapproval, since all the sample of young people, with slight variations, was found to give a strongly disapproving judgement. With regard to the request for interventions on the operative level on the other hand a sort of dispersion was noted at the level of all the various possible answers contemplated. In such a perspective it is important to note how the request for penal interventions and, above all, specifically punitive interventions was particularly rarely encountered, and how the young people tended to favour an attempt to solve the problem in a more strictly private and psychological manner, involving the primary groups of ownership, through the indication of types of intervention to clarify and support the culprits, generally of a psychological nature, but in any case certainly not punitive.