High School Cybercriminals Wreaking Havoc

Why Are More Youths Committing Online Crime?

WRITTEN BY Andrew Dornbierer

cybercrime

In June this year, UK authorities tracked down and arrested two people suspected of ring leading the largest international English speaking online cyber criminal forum. They were charged with stealing and selling the details of 65,000 bank accounts they had ransacked from computers infected with malware. They had sold the details at varying prices according to their origin, with US bank details going for $3, EU bank details for $5 and UK bank details for $7.

An interview with JUAN PABLO ESCOBAR

(now Juan Sebastian Marroquín Santos)

I was born into a world fertile for violence. With this as my legacy, my only choice is to search for peace. When deciding to expose your identity you probably evaluated the risks involved, but most likely your courage was driven by an objective which prevailed over the fear. Why did you decide to once again become the son of Pablo Escobar for the rest of the world? It seemed selfish to me, just keeping to myself a solitary pacifist legacy of this violent story. I wanted to share with young people what I have learned about the serious consequences of participating in the cruel game of drug dealing. I am just doing what I believe is right. If I can prevent even a single young person from entering that world, then it will be worth it.

Current Issues in Youth Suicide

A Global Address and an East-West Comparison

WRITTEN BY Paul Yip and Jenny Huen

Suicide is a global problem affecting many different parts of the world (see Figure 1 for a map of suicide rates globally). The global suicide rate is about one million people per year, a rate of 14.5 per 100,000 people (WHO, 2010). In particular, suicide rates among young people have risen to such an alarming extent that 15 to 19 year olds are now at highest risk of suicide in a third of all countries, with suicide being the second leading cause of mortality for this age group globally (WHO, 2009).

The Role of Civil Societies on Youth Empowerment in Post-War Sierra Leone

WRITTEN BY Isabela Leao and Albert Kim Cowan

In Sierra Leone, young people constitute about 34 per cent of the country’s total 5.6 million estimated population.(1) The broad definition of youth in Sierra Leone includes people between 15-35 years old, of whom 70 per cent are unemployed and 53.4 per cent are illiterate.(2)

The Young Child Must Grow

WRITTEN BY Helen Streeter

It is not unusual for Western NGOs to create and export programme models and development tools to Africa. What is less common is for this process to happen in reverse: when a wealthy Western nation imports a tried and tested African model to help address its social problems. This is exactly what has happened with Khulisa Crime Prevention Initiative, a South African organisation that has successfully undertaken its programmes in the UK, demonstrating the universality of its approach.

Jeunes Reporters Migrants

WRITTEN BY Jeunes Reporters Migrants (JRM) editorial staff

Raising Issues with Participation

100 young people from Italy, France, Senegal and Burkina Faso were the protagonists in the Jeunes Reporter Migrants (JRM) experience: an educational project which aims to give back a voice to people who do not have any other ways of sharing their stories and views in the mainstream media. These young people have been selected from schools or from the most disadvantaged suburbs. In Italy and France some of them have experienced migration at first-hand. The topic of the entire project is “Citizen journalism,” a new form of citizen media, where individuals can write and/or comment on issues they feel have been left-out or that tend to be covered only superficially by the mainstream media. In this case, the main issue was “migration.” The young people involved in this workshop met for six months in small newsrooms with the goal of producing reports on migrants and their concerns about living in Europe and in developing countries. In September 2010 they met in four different international exchanges programmes and they worked together to write news articles and reports which can be viewed on the website: jeunesrms.org

Living the news as leading actors

Catalina, a young woman from Romania, is 27 and has been living in Turin for one year with her family. She has written about her experience in Paris during the International Exchange along with four other young people from Italy. The highlight of the week was a visit to Créteil, Bobigny and Saint Denis, four banlieue cities and a journey around the intercultural suburbs of Belleville and Goutte d’Or, with a guide from the French association “Ça se visite.”

FBI Outreach Program Promotes Child Safety, Identification

WRITTEN BY Stephen G. Fischer Jr.

Building on its long history as an authority in fingerprinting, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uses its expertise to help parents and guardians protect America’s children through the Community Fingerprinting Program and the National Child Identification Program. Both of these initiatives capture children’s fingerprints in a format that parents can keep in case of an emergency with their child.

Security and Governance in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding

The Office and Rule of Law and Security Institutions (ORoLSI)

WRITTEN BY David Brazier

“First, we should move beyond the idea of a clear-cut sequence of peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. These tools should be deployed in an integrated fashion, not kept in separate silos. Conflict seldom follows a tidy path. We must continue to evolve, towards a faster and more flexible architecture of response that allows us to customize our assistance to the real and immediate needs on the ground”.

Teenagers in Conflict with the Law and Justice in Brazil

WRITTEN BY Aline Yamamoto and Natália Bouças do Lago

Brazil has the world’s third largest prison population.(1) Of the roughly 500,000 prisoners currently being held in the Brazilian prison system, 59 per cent are youth between 18 and 29 years of age.(2) (3) The number of adolescents (between 12 and 18 years old) who have been deprived of their liberty in the socio-educational system(4) is around 18,000.(5)

Giving Children their Right to Dream

WRITTEN BY Andrea Rachele Fiore

Since I was young I have always dreamed that what I wanted to do, when I would be an adult, was to work with something that would have contributed to make this world a better place.

An interview with Claudina Macuacua

President of the Tribunal for Minors in Mozambique

What are the main causes of the juvenile delinquency phenomenon in Mozambique? The phenomenon of minors in conflict with the law has different roots and reasons. It started with the civil war which ended in 1992 and killed parents who went off to fight, leaving children alone and abandoned. In most cases, both the mothers and the fathers lost their lives and neither returned to their homes, thus children became orphans and remained alone with nobody to look after them. These children began living on the streets trying to earn a life by carrying out little bits of work such as cleaning cars. But in the majority of cases they ended up begging and starving. As a consequence, these children grew up carrying out petty crimes and later on they committed bigger offences. The judicial authorities were not ready and were slow in taking any preventative measures. Thus children continue to grow, carrying out petty crimes like stealing phones and pieces of cars. The juveniles who commit crimes today are the same children who were abandoned by their parents because of the civil war.

Breaking the Silence

The story of Colombian Drug Kingpin Escobar through the Eyes of his Son

WRITTEN BY Nicolas Entel

The idea of making “Sins of My Father” first came about around the end of 2005, when I had an opportunity to meet Sebastián Marroquin, the only son of Pablo Escobar. Sebastián was born Juan Pablo Escobar in 1977 but was granted a name change shortly after his father’s death for security reasons. By the time of our meeting, he had been living in Argentina for a decade but few people knew about him, or his story.

Cybercrime – Counterfeiting

WRITTEN BY Eric Przyswa

The Issue of “Real-Virtual” Interactions

Most professionals define cybercrime as: “Any illegal action in which a computer is the tool or object of the criminal offence.(1) “However, this definition has the disadvantage of not taking into account the “offline world”. It means that many stakeholders, such as the French Customs, tend to broaden the de facto concept of cybercrime to acts that involve criminal flows, both in the real world and on the Internet, by using a computer.

Restavèks and Child Trafficking in Haiti

WRITTEN BY Daniel Ruiz

Haiti has come to the front of the international news after the earthquake that took place in January this year and caused more than 200,000 deaths. Another issue also called the attention of the world: the situation of the child serfs and the trafficking of minors. The Restavèks are unpaid child servants living and working away from home. In principle, parental placement of a restavèk child involves the handover of childrearing responsibility to another household in exchange for the child’s unpaid domestic service.

Connected Generation

WRITTEN BY Tim Davies

Young People and Social Networks: Outline

The Social Networking Phenomena

According to boyd and Ellison’s definitive 2007 article,(1) the first online social network service (SNS) emerged in 1997, but it is only in the last five years that social networks have made it from obscurity to become a ubiquitous part of many people’s online, and offline, day to day experience. With 2 billion people predicted to be connected to the Internet by the end of 2010,(2) Facebook now has over 500 million registered users from right across the globe.(3) 2.1 million new Twitter accounts are registered every week,(4) and regional, local and niche social network services and social media sites are being launched and are growing daily.

Youth Influence

WRITTEN BY Felix König

in Decision Making Processes

Half of the world’s population is composed of young people, and the numbers are growing. Strong shifts in global populations are already visible. The population in the global north is growing older and older, with young people making up less and less of the total population. Meanwhile the situation is the opposite in the global south. This has created many challenges, challenges that no longer can be referred to as new. What we need to find out is if the world will be up to the task of taking on these challenges.

Teenagers, Violence and Crime in Brazil

WRITTEN BY Cléssio Moura de Souza

One can not speak of violence in Brazil and its increases since 1980 without mentioning the population that it harms: the young. Reports that have been dedicated to analyzing the victims of homicide in the country since 1980 have reached a dramatic conclusion: the cause of increased violence in the country is due to the riseof homicides among young people. Studies carried out by Instituto Sangari show a dramatic and permanent increase in cases of homicide among people between 12 and 24 years of age. While in 1980 the homicide rate among youths between 15 and 24 years of age was 30.0 per 100,000, in 2007 that number had grown to 50.1.

YOUTH and DRUGS

WRITTEN BY Antonio Maria Costa

The Temptation and the Disillusion

I am glad to be given the opportunity to talk with young people about drugs, especially about the temptation to take addictive substances for fun or need, and the dis-illusion victims inevitably face – unable to overcome personal problems with a few grams of dope. I invite young people to exchange views in an urbane and fruitful manner, in recognition of everybody’s good intentions. This will help us to better understand a century-old scourge: drug addiction and the crime associated to it, and what to do about both.

The Unseen Violence

WRITTEN BY Kai-D. Bussmann

Violence in the Family

In 2010, German police registered approximately 6 million offences in their crime statistics. Less than 10 per cent of these offences involved violence against persons. However, police crime statistics do not necessarily reflect actual crime levels, but depend on the willingness of the population to report them. They tell us nothing about the “dark figure” of crime, and this applies particularly to the family domain, which is also not documented separately in German crime statistics.

Betraying young people

WRITTEN BY Kristiina Kangaspunta

Why is an issue of our Magazine devoted to youth and young people? So far we have presented specific phenomena, from illicit trafficking to cybercrimes. This issue is dedicated to the youths. There are 1.2 billion young people in the world, or 18 per cent of the global population. The UN General Assembly declared 2010-11 as the International Year of Youth. This Year is an important chance to paint a clear picture on the situation that young people face all around the world, an opportunity for governments and civil society as a whole to re-think policies and strategies in favour of youth. An opportunity for youths to make their voices heard.