10 Things About Crime With Dr Deborah Jump

Dr Deborah Jump is fast becoming one of the leading criminologists in the UK.

As the Associate Director for the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies (MCYS) her work with youth justice at Manchester Metropolitan University won a Times Higher Education Award in 2019.

Her new book Adverse Childhood Experiences and Serious Youth Violence with fellow academics Hannah Smithson and Paul Gray is out this week.

She says, ‘For many of those that commit crimes, the damage is often already done. The perpetrators are often victims themselves long before they make new victims of other people in society.

‘Our research finds, these people are in many cases traumatised individuals, whether by knife crime or some other harrowing and negative incident or serial neglect.

‘If somehow this book helps to deepen the understanding of the context and circumstances of crime, in just one person whether that be a parent, a policy maker, the police, a judge, a fellow academic or most importantly the perpetrators themselves, then all the work will not have been in vain.

‘Perhaps then, with a clearer view of why crime happens, we can start to look for concrete reasons how to help reduce it,’ she added.

More broadly, Dr Jump’s criminology areas of expertise and interest include: trauma and its relationship to violence, boxing, masculinity and violence, youth justice, forensic psychoanalysis, ethnographic and narrative methods.  

Here are her top ten criminology insights:

1. Young men commit the majority of crime, yet they are also likely to be the victims too. 
2. Domestic violence on average kills more women than breast cancer.
3. Most people grow out of crime.
4. Young people in the youth justice system have turbulent histories and are on average more likely to have experienced higher incidences of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES).
5. Prison doesn’t really work.
6. We still don’t really know for sure why people commit crime.
7. Crime is gendered. The female prison population hovers around 4% and in most cases is for non-violent offences.
8. Crime overall is down year on year since the second world war, yet fear of crime as recorded by the Crime Survey in England and Wales is up. 
9. Those who perpetrate horrific crimes report that it made sense to them at the time.
10. According to some criminologists (me included) shame and humiliation drives the majority of male violence.

Adverse Childhood Experience and Serious Youth Violence is out on the 24th April 2023.

Find further insights on Dr Deborah Jump see her full work profile at Manchester Metropolitan University.