EU Street Violence. Youth Groups and Violence in Public Spaces
tions from the Eurogang Youth Survey instrument. Among a group of lower educated secondary school students, it appeared that about 6% were member of a street gang according to the Eurogang definition (Weerman, 2005). Interestingly, membership was not restricted to boys, although they were relatively more often involved in street gangs than girls (8% among the boys, 4% among the girls, see Weerman, 2012). These figures are not very different form those reported in other studies that have used the Eurogang Youth Survey (see Decker & Weerman, 2005; Van Gemert et al., 2008; Esbensen & Maxson, 2011), or in surveys about street gangs in the United States (see Esbensen & Weerman, 2005). More comparative information was obtained by the ISRD study conducted in 30 countries that included the core questions about gang membership. In a representative sample of youths in two Dutch cities, 3.3% of respondents indicated they were involved in a street gang as per the Eurogang definition and saw themselves as members of a youth gang (Gatti et al., 2011). This figure is comparable to the other samples in the international study, somewhat below the international average of 4.4%. According to the Eurogang definition exclusively, 11.8 % of the Dutch sample belonged to a street gang (Maxson & Haymoz, 2011; personal information). These figures are similar to those from other countries involved in the study, which show that the Netherlands is on par with other countries with regard to self reported gang membership. This is illustrated in table 2, which summarises the findings regarding gang membership for a selection of countries that participated in the ISRD.
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