Substance abuse, media violence, school violence, family violence, and delinquency

Delinquent Behavior and Family Violence

an Intimate Link

Research reveals that children who grow up in a home atmosphere of violence tend to develop delinquent behavior (DESA, 2003). The family as a social institution has been going through much change in form, with one-parent families and non-marital unions crowding out the traditional type. Children in disadvantaged families who have few resources and opportunities for better employment confront much insecurity and trouble.

With very limited resources against an increase in family size, many children are neglected and suffer abuse and violence right at home. The absence of a father in the new form leads boys to seek or develop patterns of masculinity after the delinquents with whom they hang around. They take these delinquent groups as family substitute. These define their roles and contribute to developing habits like cruelty (DESA).

A cross-sectional study was conducted among 1,943 Korean adolescents of whom

707 were juvenile delinquents to explore the causes and effects of juvenile delinquency

(Kim & Kim, 2008). These delinquents reported their parents as more dysfunctional partners, less satisfactorily functional and engaging in greater family violence than the other respondent adolescents. They also reported greater incidence of antisocial personality tendencies in their families, more severe psychosomatic symptoms and frustration and greater occurrence of delinquent behavior. The strongest causes of juvenile delinquency were their antisocial personality tendency and gender, family violence, psychosomatic symptoms, family functioning, troubled parental relationship and need frustration. Gender, antisocial personality tendency and family violence directly influenced the development of delinquent behavior. The study concludes that delinquent Korean adolescents perceived and experienced more family dysfunction, violence and parental relationships than non-juvenile delinquents (Kim & Kim).

Farrington (2010) agrees that the strongest cause or predictor of delinquent behavior is the presence of criminal or antisocial parents. Other contributing factors are family size, poor parental supervision, conflict between parents, disrupted families. Selection, social learning and attachment theories explain this position. Selection theory says that anti-social people tend to have big families, poor parental supervision and disrupted families and antisocial children. The social learning theory explains that children in these families are unable to learn appropriate behavior because of the opposed parental examples or models provided. And the attachment theory says that low parental attachment produces cold, hardened children who tend to turn delinquent (Farrington).

Conclusion