From 11 to 14 September 2024, the European Society of Criminology (ESC) hosted its 24th annual conference in Bucharest. The Institute of Criminology’s Emeritus Professor of Ecological and Developmental Criminology, Professor Per-Olof Wikström, received the ESC European Criminology Award, while former PhD students Laura Kennedy and Evelyn Svingen received awards for recent publications based on their PhD research.
Professor Wikström received the 2024 ESC European Criminology Award for his lifetime contribution as a European criminologist, a particular honour given his role as a co-founder of the ESC in the 1990s. The award recognizes his major contributions to criminological theory and research on the ecology and etiology of crime.
These include developing Situational Action Theory (SAT), an original theory that explains the situational causes of crime, and the developmental causes of the causes of crime, that has been applied across different sociocultural contexts around the world. He has designed and directed the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), a groundbreaking longitudinal study into the social ecology of crime and the interaction between people and places in the explanation of crime events. The major findings from PADS+ have been collated in two major books: Breaking Rules: Situational Dynamics of Young People’s Crime (Wikström et al. 2012) and Character, Circumstances and Criminal Careers: Towards a Dynamic Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (Wikström et al. 2024). His publications present unprecedented findings about the role of social contexts, the development of crime propensities, and acts of crime and criminal careers, which have inspired theory-driven and comparative international research around the world. He has applied this large body of research to crime prevention policy and practice, including the application of key findings to the work of relevant social agencies in various international jurisdictions.
Professor Wikström’s acceptance speech can be found here. The laudation by Beate Völker (NSCR) can be found here.
In addition to Professor Wikström receiving the ESC Criminologist Award, two young scholars who completed their PhDs through the Centre for Analytic Criminology, which Wikström founded, received awards for publications based on their PhD research.
Laura Kennedy, who is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London, received the ESC 2024 Young Criminologist Award for her article, ‘Prioritise Propensity: A multimethod analysis of peer influence and school-based aggression’. This award recognises an outstanding sole-authored article by a European criminologist under the age of 35.
The article for which Kennedy was awarded the prize presents findings from the Peer Relations and Social Behaviour Study (PEERS), which Kennedy designed and conducted as part of her PhD research. PEERS applied SAT to explain aggression between young people in the school context, adapting an innovative space-time budget method developed for PADS+ to explore how young people’s personal characteristics interact with their peers’ influence in shaping aggressive behaviours in school settings.
This study’s original findings support SAT, showing that aggressive peers’ influence on young people’s behaviour depends on whether those young people hold favourable attitudes towards aggression, or are able to exercise self-control. Kennedy found that young people who do not find aggressive behaviour acceptable, or who can exercise self-control when they consider acting aggressively, are more resistant to peer pressure. She discusses the important implications for interventions, especially in schools.
An article on her award winning paper can be found here in the ESC Newsletter. The award-winning article is available open access here.
Evelyn Svingen, currently an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, received the 2024 ESC Book Award for her book ‘Evolutionary Criminology and Cooperation: Retribution, Reciprocity, and Crime’ based on her PhD research. This award recognises the author of a book that makes an outstanding contribution to the further development of European criminology.
In her book, Svingen develops and tests an evolutionary theory of crime, exploring the roles of reciprocity and retribution in criminal decision making. The first chapter presents a detailed and accessible introduction to the neuroscience and genetics of criminal propensities. Svingen discusses human attitudes and behaviours as the outcome of a culture-gene coevolution. The second chapter explores the evidence of evolved capacities for prosocial behaviour, developing the Reciprocity and Retribution Model (RRM) to frame the relationships between reciprocity, retribution and crime. The third chapter tests this model through two experimental studies: a large-scale scenario study and a public goods game adapted from behavioural economics.
Key findings support the roles of reciprocity and retribution in people’s prosocial and antisocial behaviour. Hostility is typically met with hostility, and kindness with kindness, and people tend to support punishment for those who transgress social norms. The book considers the implications of these finding for explaining, studying and preventing crime.
The Institute of Criminology congratulates Wikström, Kennedy, and Svingen for their awards.