Delinquency in Youth - PDF

Family structure, measured as a “broken home” or a home with a working mother, has consistently been identified empirically as a factor in delinquency. However, the evidence suggests that parenting styles, the quality of family relationships, and internal family dynamics are far more important facto...

Family structure, measured as a “broken home” or a home with a working mother, has consistently been identified empirically as a factor in delinquency. However, the evidence suggests that parenting styles, the quality of family relationships, and internal family dynamics are far more important factors than family structure. According to power-control theory, differences in degree of delinquency and between boys’ and girls’ delinquency, are based on whether families are structured as egalitarian or patriarchal. Tests of interactional theory have shown that low parental attachment increases delinquency, which in turn worsens attachments to parents. However, as adolescents age, parental influences diminish; delinquency lessens parental attachments, not vice versa. Public discourse and moral panics blame parents as well as children for the problem of youth crime. A new ingredient in the public blame game is “parent abuse,” yet child victimization at the hands of parents is not a public issue. Most family research focusing on parental attachments has ignored child and youth victimization and continues to define the problem as one of lack of attach- ments. The blame game and its components are indicative of a colonial way of thinking about the status of children and youth relative to parents, and our Western culture continues to promote a punitive disciplinary model of parenting roles and responsibilities. School research has tended to focus on Cohen’s and Hirschi’s theories, with most attention devoted to levels of school commitment and delinquency. Research has demonstrated that grades and level of commitment to school are better predic- tors of delinquency than are IQ scores. However, while low commitment leads to delinquency, delinquency also reduces commitment to school. The organization of schools and classrooms and the class structure of Canadian society are also seen as a source of delinquency. Contrary to Cohen’s suggestion that a middle-class school system creates status frustration for working-class boys (1955), research has shown that middle-class boys with poor grades are more likely to behave in delinquent ways and to rebel against schooling. School resistance on the part of Black students is a consequence of a conflict between schools’ cultural assumptions and rules and these students’ own cultural backgrounds and experiences. Classroom climate has a greater impact on delinquency than does the management style of the school. While schooling used to be viewed as part of the solution to youth crime issues, by the 1990s it came to be viewed as part of the problem. Violence in schools, based on isolated, atypical, and extreme incidents of school shootings, became a defining symbol of “youth gone mad.” Bullying, along with other forms of serious school violence, is a largely white, middle-class, suburban “problem.” Boys and girls are not very different in their use of indirect relational aggression against their peers. Schools have responded to youth violence with repressive and potentially criminalizing policies, such as “zero tolerance,” rather than restructuring and refocusing priorities on the well-being of children and youth. The single most important predictor of “official” delinquency is having delinquent friends. Research findings indicate that boys and girls are both “differentially exposed” to and “differentially affected” by criminogenic conditions. Both the cultural hypothesis and differential association and control theories may explain delinquency among youth from different ethnic backgrounds. Information on gangs varies depending on how “gang” is defined and how gang activity is measured. Definitions of both are politically motivated and reflect the interests of researchers and the agendas of law-enforcement agencies, politicians, and the media. Research on youth gangs indicates that not all such gangs are involved in illegal activities, that members do not spend much time on criminal activities, that their activities tend to be no more severe or frequent than those of non-gang youth, that only some gangs claim a territory, and that not all gangs are highly organized with identifiable leadership. Tanner and Wortley’s (2002) research with youth gang members in Toronto challenges some of these findings. Research indicates that street gangs in Canada today are not much different from those in the 1970s. Canadian street gangs tend to be short-lived and composed of males aged 14 to 26 who are primarily interested in lucrative property crime. Boys and girls seem to join gangs for the same reasons: Gang membership provides a social outlet, escape from an abusive or neglectful family life, and compensation for an impoverished community life. In contrast to the liberation hypothesis, some scholars argue that a “search for equivalencies” is not a useful way of understanding girls’ behaviours. Rather, their behaviours should be understood as “girls being girls,” as acts of resistance to claim or reclaim femininity from the grasp of domesticity. Over the past 15 years, research on family, school, and peers has focused on identifying risk and protective/resilience factors associated with youth crime and delinquency in general as well as violent and serious crime and gang membership. Many Western governments have capitalized on this work to launch a variety of crime prevention initiatives aimed at communities, ,while justice systems have incorporated this work into the justice system by using risk-assessment tools as a basis for decision-making and programming