Young People and Reporting Crime

Witnessing or experiencing a crime can have deep emotional impacts for people of all ages, not just young people. However, young people have specific vulnerabilities that can emphasise how they are impacted by crime and create further barriers in reporting crime and achieving justice.

Barriers to reporting a crime have the potential to exacerbate how a young person is feeling and make them feel isolated and unsupported. Therefore, it is important to make reporting crime accessible to young people.

Some barriers to reporting crimes are easier to manage than others. Some young people may not know how to report a crime or feel overwhelmed by a process deemed too serious or ‘for grown-ups’. Others might find it challenging to process and articulate complex emotions around fear, confusion, and anger that can arise from being a victim or witness.

They might also feel guilty about reporting an offence, particularly if they know who has committed it. Young people should be able to confide in appropriate adults and be informed on the benefits of doing so, but might be afraid of the repercussions of speaking out. These factors all mean that young people should be offered support in both reporting a crime and dealing with the aftermath.

The first step that professionals and appropriate adults can take in helping young people to report their experiences occurs before a crime has even been committed.

Young people must be informed on how they report crime, what support they are entitled to, and the importance of reporting crime. Reporting crime can help to prevent future victimisation, create an official record that can help the police to better allocate resources and support, and make people feel safer in their own communities if they know that action is being taken.

It is possible that if young people know of the benefits of reporting crime they may feel better empowered to take the first steps in speaking to an appropriate adult and making a report.

Furthermore, to maximise the impact of teaching young people about the benefits of reporting crime it is important that stigma around victimhood is tackled. Whilst it can be tempting to speak young people’s own language via targeted social media campaigns, I believe that this will only worsen stigma and ostracise young victims if they worry that their peers might mock social media content aimed at them.

Some young people might also interpret these campaigns on platforms like TikTok and Instagram as invasions of their safe space. This could result in the alienation of young victims, so instead I believe that content on how to report crime and deal with the emotional aftermath should instead be delivered in spaces where this kind of messaging is already established.