Introduction

This study employs a network analytical approach to examine co-offending. The aim is to test whether a network perspective can provide new approaches and fresh insights into the character of juvenile crime in a metropolitan area.

The most fundamental difference between traditional social science and research which employs a network perspective is that network analysis stipulates the existence of observable relationships among the objects under study. Over the past few decades, social network analysis has become an increasingly common approach within the social sciences in general. It is still employed only rarely in criminological studies, however, despite the fact that clear parallels exist between a network perspective and many aspects of criminological thought.

Many of the classics of criminological literature contained formulations consistent with the use of a social network perspective long before this approach became popular within social science. Shaw and McKay (1942), for example, in their Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas state that ‘delinquent boys in these areas have contact not only with other delinquents who are their contemporaries but also with older offenders, who in turn had contact with delinquents preceding them, and so on … This contact means that the traditions of delinquency can be and are transmitted down through successive generations of boys, in much the same way that language and other social forms are transmitted’ (Shaw and McKay 1942: 174).

It is well established that juvenile crime is to a large extent a group phenomenon.