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Armed Robbery In Nigeria – A Qualitative Study Of Young Male Robbers
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Armed robbery being talked about in this study involves banks, shops,
petrol stations, domestic houses and highways or motorways. It involves
different levels of force and an array of different weapons (Matthews,
2002) such as guns and knives. Matthews (2002) has also suggested that
in some armed robberies enacted in the UK, weapons were not used at all.
This is not the case in Nigeria, because those who get involved use
weapon(s) to threaten, force and deprive a person or persons of the
right to private, public or corporate belongings (Nwalozie, 2007). Based
on the different notions of the umbrella term “armed robbery†in
Nigeria and the UK, it has become too general a concept to use as a
starting point of analysis (Matthews, 2002). Although armed robbery is a
serious offence committed by youths, our interest is not so much in the
terminology “armed robbery†but we are much more concerned with
understanding what motivates them to do it. However, for the sake of
clarity and writing conventions used herein, the terms robbery and/or
armed robbery will refer to the same subject matter, “armed robberyâ€. If
for any reason a different type of robbery is mentioned, it will be
clearly stated. The initial intention to do a comparative research of
armed robbery in Nigeria and Britain was for obvious reasons: To date,
neither Nigerian nor British scholars have carried out any comparative
study of armed robbery between both countries. The absence of
cross-national or cross-cultural research on armed robbery in the two
states has created a gap in the literature. There is a colonial legacy
that makes this interesting, the British leaving a legal system in the
post colonial period and how suited or unsuited such a system is to
contemporary Nigeria in the comparative study of crime and criminal
justice. It seems also that Nigerian criminologists are not so inclined
to comparative studies due to financial constraints and access to
research data, while British criminologists seem to be more inclined to
comparing crime and criminal justice among the developed countries in
Europe and America where financial resources and access to research data
may not be so problematic. So, doing a comparative study of armed
robbery in Nigeria and Britain would probably have been the first of its
kind; it would also have generated new knowledge in criminological
science. Particularly, we would have come to know in more details the
similarities and differences surrounding the nature and patterns of
armed robbery in the two countries. Presumably any comparative research
in criminology must highlight the similarities and dissimilarities of a
particular crime in the countries being studied. Our first concern would
have been to establish whether armed robbery was a problem in both
countries (see Clinard & Abbot, 1973). The research would have
considered two different groups of youths from two different cultural
backgrounds. The study would have enabled us to know the current,
recent, and previous robbery trends in both countries. This would have
involved comparing crime rates from police data and interviews with
participants. Moreover, we would have come to know if the motivations to
robbery are either similar or different or both. Motivation to crime is
arguably the most assumed, causal variable in the origin of criminal
behaviour. Indeed no offence can be committed without the offender being
motivated by some factor(s) (Jacobs & Richards, 1999: 149).
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