The total youth crime rate went down six percent in 2005. Source: Statistics Canada, September 19, 2006.

Crime is fascinating and always has been, especially if it involves youth. The more violent it is, the more attention it gets.

These violent stories tend to dominate the coverage of youth crime. But, while it is important to cover these events, many experts who deal with youth and the law believe these stories need more context. Without proper context, they say, the public doesn't get the full picture on the issue of youth crime.

Dan Arsenault, a crime reporter for The Chronicle Herald, says it's not that he and others just focus on violent crime; they pick stories that are newsworthy.

"I wouldn't really attach that type of value judgment to it. It has to be the big stories. They probably will be violent. There isn't a lot of white-collar crime involved in youth," he says. They would look at "impact, what type of effect it has on society...basically it would be the severity of the crime," he says.

Christie Blatchford, a crime reporter for the Globe and Mail, has been covering crime off and on for about thirty years. Most of her stories, including the ones involving young offenders, are about murders. "Because," she says, "they are more interesting, and because they are the worst thing we can do to one another...taking a human life is the most egregious crime in the book, and the most egregious morally as well."

Blatchford makes no apologies for focusing on violent crime. "I heard someone say recently at a forum, 'People don't want to know that the train is on time. They want to know when the train is late and why it's late'... Stories singing the praises of various parts of the system just doesn't cut it. You have a finite amount of newsprint and a finite amount of space. Our job isn't to write about when things go well, our job is to write about when then don't."

Professor Anthony Doob says journalists need a better understanding of the youth Criminal Justice Act: 'I've had arguments with journalists... about sections in the act and what the act says.' Photo: Courtesy of Anthony Doob."

Anthony Doob, a professor at the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto, says, "the image we have of youth crime tends to be driven, quite understandably, by the very serious events. The shoplifting, the minor fights, the breaches of probation, the possession of stolen property, they don't make it into the newspaper, but these things (violent crimes) do. I think what it means is that newspapers and the media are doing their job by reporting rare events."

It's not a matter of not covering violent crime, it's a matter of giving the public all of the information they need to make an educated assessment of the issue.

Lisa Taylor is a freelance journalist who specializes in law, and an instructor in the University's of King's College Journalism Department. She says, "You do what all good journalists should do. You provide some kind of context, some kind of framework."

Doob agrees. "Let's use homicide as an example," he says. "In a given year, there's somewhere between about 30 and 70 kids charged with a homicide offence. That means that there's roughly speaking going to be one every week or two."

Doob says that instead of seeing this as a common event, one of the things journalists can do is point out that the rate of youth involved in homicides hasn't changed much in 30 years. Also, he points out that not only has the rate remained relatively low, there are about 2.5 million youth aged 12 to 17 in Canada.

"Thirty of them do something completely horrible, that's 30 more than we would have wanted but it doesn't mean that youth are out of control. So I think that the context of these things is actually really important."

For example, in the several stories about the high profile "Johnathon" trial in which an Ontario boy was killed by his brother, journalists focused on the crime, the sentencing, and the background of the case. No stories mentioned any statistics on youth crime, or the murder rate of youths. While it was a horrific case, there could have been some statistical background included to put it into perspective.

According to the Department of Justice Canada website, most cases in youth court are non-violent, and minor assault makes up nearly half of the violent offences. Over 40 per cent of the cases in youth court fall into four categories: theft under $5000, possession of stolen property, failure to appear, and failure to comply with a disposition.

Also, according to Statistics Canada, youth crime went down by six per cent last year. There was a 12 per cent decrease in property crime. Although there was an increase in the most serious violent offences, it did not represent a trend, and the total violent crime rate actually went down two per cent.

Lisa Taylor: 'I think that there will always be some degree of inflammatory reporting around youth crime because it's such a sexy topic and because it gets ordinary people so exercised.' Photo: Courtesy of the Daily News

According to Taylor, youth crime is a particularly easy issue to put in context because there are so many sources of information, from Statistics Canada to published work by criminologists and legal academics.

"With all these wonderful, up-to-date, objective, reliable sources there, you can add that simple little line or two in your story that puts this in context, because here's what the violent crime rate, the rate of violent crime committed by youth, here's what's happened to it the past five years or the past ten years," she says.

"It doesn't mean not telling the story," she adds, "it just means using those vehicles there to give it a bit of context."

Arsenault argues that finding that information may not be as easy as it sounds. And once you find it, you have to figure out a way to work it into your story.

"It's kind of tricky. Is it easy to work something like that into a story about a kid that stabs on Christmas morning? How do you work the fact that so many kids that enter into the criminal justice system for the first time don't return? That's hard to work into a major crime," he says. "But," he adds, "it can be done."

Reporting on crime requires understanding the law

Doob believes part of the reason why youth crime stories may not be as balanced as they should be is because journalists do not have a good understanding of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. "I've had arguments with journalists...about sections in the act and what the act says," says Doob. "The problem is, the worst thing when you're writing something is if you think you know it. When you know you don't know it that's fine, because then you find out. But there's a lot of misunderstandings about what the nature of the law."

On April 1, 2003, the new Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) replaced the old Young Offenders Act. The objectives of the YCJA are to prevent crime, rehabilitate the youth already involved in the justice system, and reintegrate these youth back into their communities. The act also requires judges to choose the sentence that is best for rehabilitating young offenders. Under the act, only violent offenders and serious repeat offenders should serve jail time, and only if there are no other alternatives.

"It is an act that is separate and distinct from the criminal code, and it does have different objectives than the criminal code, and ideologically it comes from a different place than the criminal code," says Taylor.

When journalists don't understand that, she says, it can cause problems.

"I know there are way too many people reporting who seem to equate light sentence with injustice, that unless we're incarcerating a young person, then the system has somehow failed because that's the way to fix the problem."

According to Statistics Canada, the number of apprehended youths who were formally charged by the police dropped from 56 per cent in 2002 to 43 per cent last year. Also, last year's crime rate was the lowest it's been in about five years. (The total crime rate also includes the youth who were dealt with alternatively outside of the justice system.)

Taylor says journalists need a better understanding of the act, what its objectives are, and why it has the objectives that it has.

"There is a great guide on understanding the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and there has been quite a bit of commentary around the act, and I think we have to understand this act in order to be able to properly frame stories about youth crime."

Arsenault agrees that journalists do not have a strong understanding of the YCJA. "But," he says, "in this media market it doesn't come into play that often." While journalists may have difficulty understanding the act, Arsenault points out that every news agency has a lawyer they can talk to if they have issues, or they can talk to their editors. Arsenault says that every story has a challenge, and this is just another challenge.

In the end, experts are hoping for more context and a better understanding of the issue. This understanding can then be passed on to the public. But no one is holding their breath.

"I think there will always be some degree of inflammatory reporting around youth crime because it's such a sexy topic and because it gets ordinary people so exercised," says Taylor. "(But) we are a long way from seeing balanced, non-inflammatory coverage particularly about youth crime."