In 2004, at the request of Save the Children UK, the Mediacentar Sarajevo conducted monitoring of daily and weekly BiH press outlets, focusing on the topic of juveniles’ conflict with the law.

Dailies covered by this monitoring, in the period from 1 January to 31 March 2004, included: Oslobođenje, Dnevni avaz, Nezavisne novine, Jutarnje novine, Dnevni list and Glas srpski. Weeklies covered by the monitoring included Dani, Slobodna Bosna and Novi reporter, issues from the period from 1 January to 31 December 2004.
Since juvenile delinquency is a real and pressing social problem facing school-age children, as well as their teachers and parents, and the entire community, the question that emerges is how to report about this problem, having in mind that the image presented by the media about such cases may influence public opinion on how wide-ranging this problem is, on its nature and significance. Media should in any case fully respect privacy and not violate juveniles’ rights in a way that could impact on their psychic state or even their lives. This is the focus of Article 11 of the Press Code, put together by the BiH Press Council.
The largest number of scrutinised articles, out of a total of 283 selected ones, has been published in the Crna hronika section. In other sections in which certain topics could be tackled in a more thorough and more serious way, only 12% of the total number of selected texts has been published. Such representation ratio of articles dealing with juvenile delinquency in different sections points to a conclusion that newspapers report about this issue at the news level, but not at the level of a more detailed analysis, which would point to a wider social context and significance of this issue.
A general conclusion of this research is that there is an obvious lack of serious journalistic texts about juvenile delinquency. There are very few analytical articles, since sections such as comments and interviews do not at all deal with juvenile delinquency, which in combination with negligible analytical approach in other sections, points to a conclusion that there is a significant lack of media interest in the topic of juvenile conflict with the law.
At the same time, in few existing analytical pieces, which stand out because of their versatile and serious approach to the topic, there is almost no violation of the Press Code.

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