Chapter Six

The Family and Juvenile Delinquency

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1.      To be aware that both the psychological and sociological disciplines contribute to our understanding of the family’s influence on delinquency.

2.      To be able to identify the many different family characteristics that are related to delinquency.

3.      To recognize patterns of family interaction which are likely to result in delinquency.

4.      To understand the evidence that supports a connection between delinquency and both child abuse and neglect.

5.      To be aware of the involvement of law enforcement, juvenile court, correctional personnel, and protective services in the prevention, detection, and treatment of child abuse and neglect cases.

6.      To know that beliefs about the family have led some people to regard the family as the only influence on delinquency, and others to ignore the family’s effect.

CHAPTER OUTLINE:

·        This chapter present psychologists’ and sociologists’ views on an idea which many people accept without question-that the family is a major influence on the phenomenon of delinquency.

·        What happens in the family is believed to have great impact on how children behave in other social institutions and on whether they become serious delinquents.

The Family as a Linking Concept

·        The family can be seen as an important linking concept, that is, an idea that helps us to organize and further develop our thoughts about how the environment has its influence on delinquency and about how individual predispositions towards delinquency are developed.

·        Larzelere and Patterson’s study revealed that there are differences in how parents monitored and disciplined their children; these differences explained the greater early involvement in delinquency for lower-class, in comparison to working-class, boys.

·        The centrality of the family in understanding delinquency is illustrated by research that has revealed the following: 1) family differences can explain why demographic characteristics are moderately associated with delinquency, and 2) family differences can explain official reactions to adolescents.

Psychology and the Family

·        Psychologists who stress personality development feel that early emotional deprivation is directly associated with, and related to, later psychological disturbances and emotional problems.

Personality Development

·        The early life experiences of the child in the family lay the groundwork for the type of future behavior and the development of attitudes, values, and a lifestyle.

·        One type of explanation that is often offered for continuous delinquent behavior that eventually becomes adult criminality is that the individual has a psychopathic personality; not all psychopaths are involved in illegal activity, but several of their characteristics predispose them towards breaking the law.

·        Neurological predispositions and family factors have been implicated in the causation of the psychopathic personality.

Learning of Behavior

·        Learning psychologists use punishment by parents as a key concept to explain how the family influences delinquency.

·        The use of inconsistent discipline is another way that parents encourage aggression or other forms of delinquency.

Sociology and the Family

·        The sociologist is concerned more with the general environment as it relates to the distribution of crime, the factors in the system that affect crime rates, and the functioning of institutions of control that have been commissioned to deal with the offender.

·        The chance of delinquency becomes greater when both personal control and social controls break down.

The Environment of the Family

·        Sociological explanations of criminality and delinquency do not oppose psychological explanations because they are not rival answers to the same question but answer different questions about the same sort of behavior.

·        Loeber and Stauthamer-Loeber’s research revealed that the delinquents’ families stood out in terms of breakdowns in family socialization such as lack of parental supervision, rejections of the children by their parents, and general failure of parents to be involved with their children’s lives.

Broken Homes

·        Despite the beliefs and research that support the idea that the broken home is of considerable importance in the development of delinquency, this conclusion is not shared by all people.

·        Wilkinson noted that previous research was seriously flawed and suggested improvements in the area of research included: a) refining the definition of the broken home, and b) clarifying the connection between the broken home and unofficial delinquency.

·        Rankin maintained that conflicting findings about broken homes and delinquency lacked the necessary focus on examining the relationship between specific types of delinquency and specific types of broken homes.

Parental Rejection

·        Rejected or neglected children who do not find love and affection, as well as support and supervision at home, often resort to groups outside the family; frequently these groups are of a deviant nature.

·        Many professionals in the fields of both psychology and sociology agree that open rejection and hostility can directly affect youngsters and ultimately produce delinquency and that the family institution has the greatest influence on the youngster’s behavior in the community.

Methods of Parental Control

·        Wells and Rankin identified at least three ways in which parents exercise direct control; specifying particular rules; monitoring their children’s behavior; and punishing their children.

·        McCord, McCord, and Zola classified methods of disciplining youngsters under six types; the researchers noted that lax or erratic discipline was strongly related to delinquency, whereas consistent discipline was significantly related to nondelinquency.

·        Research has supported the idea that consistency of discipline is the essential element in establishing an atmosphere where delinquency is less likely to develop.

Parental Emotional Stability

·        Delinquent behavior can often be directly traced to behavioral disturbances and emotional instability in one or both of the parents.

·        In households where parents have behavioral disturbances and manifestations of emotional immaturity, instability, or insecurity, there is a frequent loss of temper and the direction of inappropriate emotions to children.

·        While the unconscious transmission of negative attitudes of parents to their children has been a subject of much discussion, theorists disagree as to the amount and form that these transmissions take.

Family Economics

·        Roger Jarjoura and Ruth Triplett argued that social class experiences and conditions will subsequently influence criminal behavior; specifically, violent offending was related to family income, household head’s educational attainment and occupational prestige, and receiving welfare benefits.

Interaction in the Contemporary Family

·        While some family factors are difficult to change, such as family economics and broken homes, there are some factors that probation officers, social workers, and other court and corrections staff can change.  These factors involve family interaction.

Parenting Skills

·        One of the characteristics of families in which one or more children are disturbed is the inability of family members to work out difficulties without engaging in destructive arguments.

·        Patterson maintained that many people take the ability to act as a parent for granted but this assumption is erroneous.

Avoidance of Decision Making

·        Parents find that one of their most difficult tasks is decision making; parents avoid making important decisions for their children in many ways.

·        Because of the difficulty in making important decisions, parents tend to oversimplify the process by subscribing to their an extremely permissive or an extremely disciplinarian philosophy and approach to child rearing.

Unrecognized Immaturity

·        Technological advances and rapid social change have led many parents to believe that, because their youngsters seem more sophisticated intellectually and socially, they are also better equipped emotionally to handle complex problems.

·        Adolescents may say they are grown up, may sound as if they are grown up, and may look as if they are grown up but may still vacillate between wanting to be children and wanting to be adults.

·        Too often parents give their children decision-making power under the guise of the children’s right to individual freedom; parents sometimes go so far as to act as a sibling to their own children.

Unconscious Parental Transmissions

·        When parents transmit only negative feelings or attitudes without assisting their youngsters in developing the accompanying frustration tolerance and self-control, problem situations can occur.

·        Parents can also transmit to children the attitude of individual rights and freedom of expression.  The problem is when these two highly valued norms are encouraged without emphasizing personal responsibility and social consciousness.  An example of this transmission is the use of drugs.

·        Persons working with juvenile delinquents can also be guilty of the same phenomenon.

Inconsistency between Adults

·        In some families, one adult undermines the efforts of another adult to set limits on a child’s behavior; often one of the adults, usually a parent, is harsh and the other parent disagrees with the harsh and punishment approach.

·        As a child grows older in a family in which the adults are inconsistent, she or he can often manipulate the parents to obtain favors or a relaxation of the rules.

Child Abuse and Neglect

·        The same youths who are abused may be delinquent, for abuse can lead to delinquency; the complex social conditions that result in one of these can lead to delinquency.

·        All of the causal and practical connections between delinquency and both abuse and neglect underscore the necessity of having some familiarity with abuse and neglect in order to develop a full understanding of juvenile delinquency and the operations of the juvenile justice system.

History of Child Protection

·        The case of Mary Ellen dramatized the fact that the welfare of animals had been considered more important than that of human children.

·        In 1946, radiologist John Caffey reported on six infant patients with indications of being abused.

·        Dr. C. Henry Kempe conducted a national survey to determine the frequency of cases of abuse in a given year; he coined the term the “battered child syndrome.”

The Problem

·        The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System reported that in 1997 there were approximately 984,000 victims of maltreatment; in 1997, there were 967 children known to state child protective services agencies who died as a result of child abuse and neglect.

·        In 1997, child protective services agencies investigated over three million children who were alleged victims of maltreatment; over half of these reports were from professionals.

·        Cases of abuse are often identified or diagnosed in a medical setting; neglected children may be as easily identified as physically abused children but are of equal concern to the professionals in the field.

·        Neglect is characterized by omission rather than commission as in child abuse because the caretaker of a child is failing to provide for the essential needs of the child rather than intentionally harming the child.

·        Like the neglected child, the sexually abused child is quite difficult to identify; school programs have been designed to help children understand that they have a right to decline sexual advances, and to assist them in revealing victimization.

·        Adolescents who are abused suffer a wide range of emotional as well as physical problems, and they rarely seek help or even talk to someone about their difficulties.

·        Although sexual abuse does not usually result in any physical injury, research has shown that there are serious immediate and long-term emotional impacts.

The Relationship of Child Abuse and Neglect to Delinquency

·        There is a clear tendency for delinquent youths to have a history of child abuse and neglect; this was first demonstrated in the study conducted by the Gluecks.  The result revealed that there was a significant relationship between child maltreatment and delinquency.

·        Researchers have consistently identified physical, sexual, and emotional abuse as a first step into the juvenile justice system among girls.

·        Brezina argued that many criminologists have attempted to explain the maltreatment-delinquency relationship by using one of three dominant frameworks: 1) social control, 2) social learning, and 3) social psychological strain theory.

·        Despite evidence of association between abuse and aggressive delinquency, some observers have cautioned that the relationship between maltreatment and delinquency may not be one of direct causality.

Juvenile Justice System and Child Abuse

·        In its early stages, child abuse legislation encouraged the reporting of cases of child abuse primarily to law enforcement authorities; today, protective services divisions of social service agencies are also legally mandated to respond to child abuse.

·        In spite of the concentration of responsibility for child abuse in social service agencies, the public is accustomed to reporting cases of physical violence to the police.

·        In deciding on prosecution, it is essential to weigh the potential pros and cons for the child.

·        Protective services workers, sometimes in cooperation with the police, investigate and determine whether juvenile court involvement is needed.

·        The juvenile court has legal jurisdiction over the case and thus must order that an emergency case be continued; the court also has the authority to order that the child be placed in foster care or some other setting or that family memebers receive counseling once the hearing has been completed.

·        In situations when the intake division can file a petition determining a child is “in need of supervision,” this neglected or dependent child can be charged with a status offense.

·        The child’s rights advocates have raised serious questions abuse the practice of charging and detaining youths as status offenders when they themselves are the victims of abuse and neglect.

·        Controversy about handling neglected and abused youths is even more complicated when a youth is delinquent and either abused or neglected, for then treatment for both related difficulties is needed.

Prevention

·        Some observers suggest that only major changes in the structure of our society will ease the problems experienced by families that may lead to abuse or neglect.

·        Although Keniston recognizes that there is a need for public agencies to intervene formally when children are at risk of serious injury, he believes that reorganization of our health care system, full employment, government income supplements, and other substantial changes in society would contribute to a reduction of the stresses and problems which are often precursors to abuse and neglect.

·        In 1987, the Children’s Justice Act authorize as part of the Child Abuse Prevention Treatment Act, was established to develop and to operate programs designed to improve child abuse cases.

·        Richard Gelles noted that over the past thirty years, numerous child maltreatment programs have been implements; when asked, “what works?” the answer is either “We don’t know” or “Most interventions are not very effective.”

Exposure to Domestic Violence and Delinquency

·        It is estimated that between 3.3 million and 10 million children are exposed to violence between adult intimate partners every year.

·        Exposure to domestic violence can result in learning that violence is acceptable, can interrupt the positive parenting that children need, and in many instances is related to children also being subjected to family violence.

·        There is evidence that the best insulator against the negative effects of domestic violence on children is a strong relationship to a caring adult.

Beliefs, Theory, and Research

·        People who feel that the family does not play an important part in causing delinquency point out that, in many studies, the families of official delinquents are compared to the families of adolescents who are not in contact with the juvenile justice system.

·        At this time, there is no research evidence indicating that we should completely ignore the family as a cause of delinquency; even if there were, it is unlikely that this would occur.

·        It is important to carefully consider the quality of research, taking into account things like the use of official records rather than self-report delinquency measures.

·        In drawing conclusions about families and delinquency, we also must avoid making erroneous assumptions about families.

CLASSROOM DISCUSSION:

1.      What family characteristic are most likely to result in delinquency?  Use research finding described in this chapter to support your view.

2.      State the major reason why parents and their children have difficulty communicating when they interact.

3.      What form of discipline by parents is most likely to guard against delinquency?  Explain the extent to which your opinion is based on research findings or, alternatively, on your personal beliefs.

4.      What is the difference between discipline and abuse?  Explain your answer in detail.

5.      Identify the indicators of emotional and physical abuse that seem to contribute to delinquency and status offending.

6.      What is the role of child protective agencies and law enforcement agencies in cases of child abuse and neglect?

7.      Should child abusers be prosecuted?  Give reasons for your answer.

8.      Should juvenile court personnel routinely ask youth if they have been neglected or abused?  Explain your answer by considering, among other things, the number of maltreated children who are likely to be involved with the juvenile court and the use of the information.