Abstract:United Nations guidance on crime prevention calls on countries to include prevention considerations into all relevant social and economic policies and programmes, placing particular emphasis on communities, families, children, and youth at risk. Similarly, but with a focus on youth crime, a recent resolution adopted by Member States calls for mainstreaming youth crime prevention strategies into all relevant social and economic policies and programmes to protect youth from social marginalization and exclusion and to reduce their risk of becoming victims or offenders. At the Thirteenth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 2015, Member States acknowledged that communities, families, health and education professionals play a crucial role in preventing and responding to youth crime. Reference was made to specific urban crime phenomena, including crime committed by gangs, which required new and innovative approaches to crime prevention. Empowering youth and engaging them as agents of change offers a great potential to achieve positive developments in society. From the perspective of social crime prevention, this Themenbox presentation will focus on ways to address root causes of youth crime and violence and to strengthen resilience of youth by designing and implementing evidence-based programmes at community level, including by making use of sports.
Vita:Johannes de Haan (The Netherlands) works as Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Officer at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), providing technical assistance in Member States around the world on crime prevention and support to the work of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. Currently he is leading the implementation of the youth crime prevention component of the UNODC Global Programme to support the implementation of the 2015 Doha Declaration adopted by the 13th United Nations Crime Congress. Before joining the UN, Mr. De Haan worked for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, both at the Conflict Prevention Centre in Vienna and the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, as well as for the European Union Rule of Law Mission for Iraq. He started his career as research assistant at the Department for Peace and Conflict Research of the University of Uppsala in Sweden.