Browsing by Author "Haapa, Sanna K."

The aim of the study is to inspect with GIS methods socio-economic structures in relation to homicides of youth in the context of Mexican Drug War. The escalation of violence has impacted youth, who fell victims to homicide more often since 2006. The study’s concentration is how the local conditions of poverty, marginalization risk of youth and violence of criminal organizations are related to elevated homicide rates of youth in 2005 and in 2010. Mexico was a relatively peaceful country before the escalation of violence since 2006. The crisis of violence has been branded by media as the Mexican Drug War, where over 200 000 people have died. Conflicts between criminal organizations and the changes in political atmosphere have been considered as main reasons for the escalation. However, the escalation of intentional homicides was recorded to exceed the areas where criminal organizations operate. The impact of increased violence on youth and the cost to the society underlie the importance of studying conditions of where violence takes place. There is no theoretical framework for conflicts where drug cartel related homicides and unrelated homicides increase at the same time, only other examples been recorded only in favelas of Brazil and to an extent in Columbia. Theoretical framework was drawn from comparing gang and criminologist studies to theories on civil conflicts. Through the literature, poverty has been theorized as a primary cause of increase in level of violence. The high marginalization risk of youth has been connected to criminal behaviour. The increased activity by criminal organizations has had an indisputable impact of murder rates. These three statements set the hypotheses for the thesis. The variables were collected to represent the municipal conditions of population, households and interest points of criminal organizations. The spatial analysis was conducted by using Ordinary Least Square Regression to represent the global impacts of variables across Mexico and Geographically Weighted Regression for the local variance. The results of analysis demonstrate that the spatial dimensions of violence have changed between 2005 and 2010. The homicides of youth have increased across the country, were more clustered in 2010 than in 2005. The results suggest that the increased number of homicides in 2010 are more strongly related to marginalization than to absolute poverty. The effect of variables for poverty fell in significance between 2005 and 2010. The marginalization on the other hand, seemed to have a greater explanatory power to local increase in young homicide victims in 2010, especially when concurring with bloodshed by criminal organizations. The violence between criminal organizations had the strongest increasing impact on homicide rates, non-existent in 2005 and eminent in 2010. The regression models’ performance was weaker in 2005 than in 2010. However, the moderately weak performance of regression models and the residuals suggest that the results are not comprehensive and further research is called for.