Legal Knowledge of Estonian Youth. Comparison of 1970s and 1990s

• Author: Silvia Kaugia
• Pages: 20-29

Silvia Kaugia

Legal Knowledge of Estonian Youth. Comparison of 1970s and 1990s

Legal knowledge is an important structural element of legal awareness besides socio-legal attitudes and behaviour patterns. A dominating role in ensuring a person's lawful behaviour is attributed to legal knowledge when placing it first in the list of structural elements of legal awareness, while on the other hand, the importance of legal knowledge is seen as the shaper of other structural elements of legal awareness (attitudes, readiness for lawful behaviour). Offenders are generally known to have better legal knowledge than law-abiding people. This is due to the peculiarity of the experience of offenders - they have more contacts with bodies of legal protection, from where they gain a great volume of legal knowledge. They also gain knowledge from contacts with criminals and actively seek legal knowledge by studying laws to learn how to avoid punishment. This does certainly not imply that offenders have a more developed legal awareness or that their high legal awareness makes them violate the law. Legal behaviour is influenced not only by legal knowledge, but also by attitudes and behaviour patterns. Otherwise stated, the lawful behaviour of an individual is influenced by the inner regulators of his or her behaviour - these are the social values and acting principles promoted and protected by legal norms that are accepted by the individual as subjective values. ¹

Description of Study

The political socio-economic changes in Estonia have brought about changes in all the structural elements of legal awareness. The shifts that have taken place are the subject of the research "Youth and law in the changing Estonia: 1974-1998" financed by the Estonian Science Foundation.

In our study, we divided the structural elements of legal awareness in further detail as follows:

1) legal knowledge;

2) perception of ideal law (justice is the basis and the applicable law is compared with justice);

3) attitude to applicable law;

4) requirements for law;

5) attitude towards abidance by legal rules. ²

This article is focused on one part of the legal awareness of young people, legal knowledge, by comparing questionnaire results for the years 1975 and 1995. The comparison is possible because the present study is a repeated study based on the concept developed at the criminology laboratory of the Tartu State University in 1974. The first stage of the study was carried out in 1974-1977.

The contingent of both the original and the repeated study is made up of young people aged 15-18 from different groups: 1) secondary school pupils;

2) vocational school pupils;

3) offenders.

For the purposes of this study, offenders are young people with regard to whom a condemnatory judgement has been made or the measures provided in the Juvenile Sanctions Act ³ applied (the offenders in this study are convicts of the Viljandi Juvenile Prison and pupils of the Kaagvere Reformatory).

Opinions on Criminal Liability

The questionnaire contained several sets of questions to find out about the legal knowledge of the studied persons. It should be explained that as the study mainly deals with the criminological aspects of the legal education of youth, it deals with the norms of criminal law applicable at the time of answering the questionnaire and knowledge of these norms.

The opinions of youth on the criminal liability of minors are quite important from the criminological aspect. It helps to find better solutions to the issues of criminal liability of minors by making better use of means of criminal law in combat against juvenile delinquency.

Two basic questions arise in this respect: 1) who is prosecuted, in the opinion of youth, for offences committed by minors (younger than 18 years);

2) who should, in the opinion of youth, be prosecuted for offences committed by minors.

The answers of the studied persons to these questions are presented in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1. Who is prosecuted for offences committed by minors (%)?

No.	Answer	Year	Secondary school pupils	Vocational school pupils	Offenders
1.	Only the minor himself/herself	1975; 1995	27.7; 36.0	35.6; 37.0	48.1; 58.0
2.	The minor and his/her parents (caregivers)	1975; 1995	53.1; 44.0	50.0; 45.0	40.7; 31.0
3.	The minor and his/her teachers	1975; 1995	0.2; 1.0	0.4; 0	0.7; 3.0
4.	The minor, his/her parents and teachers	1975; 1995	4.0; 2.0	2.9; 1.0	3.0; 0
5.	Only the parents (caregivers) of the minor	1975; 1995	14.4; 16.0	10.4; 15.0	6.7; 4.0
6.	Other	1975; 1995	0.6; 1.0	0.7
3.0	0.7; 5.0

Table 2. Who should really be prosecuted and punished for offences committed by minors (%)?

@Z_TBL_HEAD = TABLE TEXT	TABLE TEXT	TABLE TEXT	TABLE TEXT	TABLE TEXT	TABLE TEXT
No.	Answer	Year	Secondary school pupils	Vocational school pupils	Offenders
1.	Only the minor himself/herself	1975; 1995	56.7; 73.0	52.9; 69.0	61.5; 75.0
2.	The minor and his/her parents (caregivers)	1975; 1995	35.5; 24.0	35.3; 23.0	30.4; 15.0
3.	The minor and his/her teachers	1975; 1995	0.5; 0	1.1; 2.0	0; 3.0
4.	The minor, his/her parents and teachers	1975; 1995	3.5; 1.0	4.0; 1.0	1.5; 1.0
5.	Only the parents (caregivers) of the minor	1975; 1995	2.2; 2.0	4.7; 2.0	6.7; 1.0
6.	Other	1975; 1995	1.7; 1.0	2.2; 3.0	0; 5.0

According to § 3 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Estonia (CC), only the person guilty in an offence, i.e. the person having intentionally or by negligence committed an act specified in the Criminal Code, is subject to criminal liability and punishment. Criminal punishment is applied only on the basis of a court judgement. The same holds true for minors subject to criminal liability. Criminal liability of minors begins at the 15^th and in exceptional cases at the 13^th year of age (CC § 10). The respective age limits in the Soviet criminal law were 16 and 14.

Other answers may be correct in certain cases - but only if minors are induced or engaged in crime, which is a separate set of elements of a criminal offence (cf. CC §§ 202 and 17). As the question in the questionnaire concerned prosecution only for offences committed by minors (without any additions or clauses), only one answer can be considered correct: only the minor himself/herself is prosecuted for an offence committed by him or her.

In this view, the legal knowledge of young offenders is much better than that of law-abiding youth, and has improved in time when compared to the other groups (see Table 1). Two important shifts are revealed in comparing the two questionnaires: 1) According to the data of the second questionnaire, 58% of offenders know that only the minor himself or herself is prosecuted for an offence committed by him or her (only 48% of young offenders knew it in the 1975 study);
2) When compared to other groups, the offenders group contains the smallest number (4%) of persons who believe that only the parents (caregivers) of a minor are liable for an offence committed by the minor. The respective share of studied persons who think so is 16% in the secondary school group and 15% in the vocational school group. The share of youths who think that parents are responsible for the offences of minors has generally increased in the last years, but it has decreased among offenders (see Table 1).

The results meet our expectations, especially when considering that the offenders questioned were youths who had committed an offence and had been convicted - owing to their experience, they have a better awareness of legal matters than their law-abiding peers. Those young offenders whose offences have not been discovered and who hence have no significant contacts with bodies of legal protection can be expected to be more similar to law-abiding youths than to special vocational school pupils or juvenile prison convicts in respect of their legal knowledge.

The mistaken understanding of mainly law-abiding youth that only parents (caregivers) are prosecuted for offences committed by minors is alarming. It...