Religious Affiliation, Religiosity, and Juvenile Delinquent Behavior

This paper focuses on the impact of religion and religiosity on juvenile delinquency. It begins with a brief overview about the criminological and theoretical basis, explaining why religiosity may have an effect on delinquency. Outcomes from previous studies as well as the actual hypotheses are discussed and presented. Two hypotheses derived from international research on the differential effects of individual religiosity on different kinds of crime and the social process that cause the effects of religiosity on delinquent behavior (Type of Crime-Hypothesis and Social Control-Hypothesis) are analyzed using representative survey data from 9th graders (N = 3,517). Additionally, the paper explores whether religiosity has different effects for young migrants with an Islamic religious affiliation compared to Christian migrants and autochthon Christian juveniles. Religiosity is found to display a moderate to large effect towards reducing juvenile delinquency. The effect differs for different kinds of deviant behavior. Only by using the incidence - instead of the prevalence - it can be shown, that religiosity negatively affects rates of violent behavior not only for Christians but for young Muslims too. The effects of religiosity to a large extent are mediated by processes of informal social control associated with religion.