Including victim and offenders, they are all aged among 14 to 17, which are considered as teenagers. This murdering case is shocking since it revealed that in Hong Kong, a city with such a low crime rate, Homicide case with numerous amounts of deviances involved can occur. This might be highly related to Strain Theory advocated by Robert Agnew.
Strain Theory states that social structures within society may pressure citizens to commit crime[1]. Strain Theory states that people are rational and are procedurally motivated to commit crime. People might express their feelings, emotions and points of views to society via committing crimes. There are three main sources of strain: First, one failed to achieve goals normally set by middle class; second, removal of positive achievement done early; third, being exposed to crime related or badly effecting content. When people feel strained, people have 5 adaptations to eliminate strain including: Conformity, Innovation, Ritualism, Retreatism and Rebellion. Generally, delinquents who strained will normally be considered to adapt Retreatism, which is breaking both culture goals and structural means.
In Hong Kong, the society defines and emphasizes monetary success as the predominant cultural goal. Since Hong Kong is a knowledge-based society, the society always emphasizes academic success is equivalent to monetary success. Most of the parents in Hong Kong want their children perform well in examinations, so that they can get into upper classes more easily. However, it is not an achievable goal for all young people in Hong Kong, including gangsters involved in the case. Given that the most of the gang members come from broken family, it is likely that they have low academic achievement because of their lack of parental supervision. Hong Kong has long been facing the problem of insufficient university degrees provided each year for a long time. In order to deal with this problem, the government raises the difficulty of the public examination to reduce the number of students who can enter university. In fact, it is well known that Hong Kong public examination is one of the hardest examinations among all international countries.
Around 12,300 of 73,000 students managed to get admitted to local universities each year. Such a low rate frustrates a lot of students and makes teenagers give up on studying hard. The disjunction between cultural goals and the structural impediments to achieving them is the anomic gap in which crime is bred. Also, teen gangs are not rare in Hong Kong due to large amount of estates built and its density among buildings inside each estate, which provides breeding grounds for triads and gangs to recruit new members. Teenagers who do not perform well in academics are likely to join them eventually. Although the main reasons why gangsters maul the victim is victim’s betrayal, the low academic achievement and the strain from it is also a stimuli that make the tragedy happened.
