Context is Key: An international study on the importance of structural factors in youth delinquency and victimization among native and migrant students in Western European countries

Western European countries have seen a major rise in the diversity of their population over the past few decades. At the same time, the ideas of tolerance, acceptance and respect which provided the main components of multiculturalism in the 1990s have been challenged by increasing polarization within society, with immigration representing a topic of heated debates. Despite decreasing (youth) crime rates, immigration is often linked to crime in these debates, and more particularly the overrepresentation in crime statistics of specific groups of young first and second generation children of immigrants. Delinquent development is often directly related to their cultural background, but this association ignores other dynamics in delinquent development such as the influence of more structural socioeconomic and institutional factors. Also most attention is focused on these young people as offenders of criminal behavior, but not as possible victims of crime. This thesis uses data from the third wave of the International Self-Report Delinquency study, a large study among 11 to 16 year old high school students across more than 30 countries, to examine victimization and offending among native and migrant young people and related explanations across different developmental contexts in Western European countries.