Evaluation of neuropsychological characteristics and attention bias in juvenile offenders, juvenile victims and the juveniles who have not participated in the criminal justice system

In recent years, the increasing inclusion of children in the criminal justice system as "juvenile offender" and "juvenile victim" emerges as a serious problem on several counts. The aim of this study is to evaluate whether juvenile offenders differ from juveniles who have not participated in the criminal justice system and juvenile victims in terms of executive function skills and attentional bias. The participants were 85 children between the age of 12 - 18. There were two case groups which have open criminal case file in Antalya Courthouse and one control group. The first case group consisted of 30 juvenile offenders and the second case group consisted of 30 juvenile victims. Control group consisted of 25 juveniles who did not have an experience of being juvenile offender or juvenile victim. In this context, children's executive functions were measured with the Barratt Impulsivity Scale Short Form, Raven Standard Progressive Matrices Test, Stroop Test TBAG Form, Wisconsin Card Matching Test and İstanbul 5 Cube Planning Test, while attentional bias was measured with the Dot-Probe task. For all three groups, illiteracy, mental retardation and being non-native speaker of Turkish were determined as exclusion criteria. As a result of the study, it was found that the scores of the juvenile offender group on the Barratt Impulsivity Scale were significantly higher than the children in the juvenile victim group and the children in the control group. For other tests that measure executive functions in the study, the scores of the control group were significantly higher than juvenile offenders and juvenile victims. In terms of attentional bias, it was found that the children in the control group exhibited less attentional bias than the juvenile offenders and victims. Finally, it was found that the executive function skills of the control group were better than the juvenile offender and juvenile victim groups. Keywords: Juvenile offender, juvenile victim, executive functions, attentional bias