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Amid high-profile reports of young people committing heinous crimes, a criminologist dives into the data to get a better sense of the scale and severity of China’s juvenile delinquency problem. Scroll through any news website, social media platform, or short video app in China and you’ll probably think that juvenile delinquency is on the rise. Serious cases of violence, from school bullying to murder, have shocked the public and led to much pearl-clutching about the purported “moral decline” of young people, as well as calls for lowering the age of criminal responsibility and introducing harsher penalties. Many observers have also cited official data as evidence of rampant juvenile delinquency. According to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s top procuratorial body, 327,000 juveniles were investigated for crimes by the country’s local procuratorates from 2018 to 2022, increasing by an average of 7.7% per year. However, this does not necessarily correlate with the
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