Crime and the family

... Crime and the family Crime is sometimes popularly blamed on the family, with poor parenting, lack of discipline and family breakdown often associated with youth crime. A recurrent theme in academic research has been to investigate the relationship between delinquency and a range of family related factors. Early studies explored child-rearing behaviour, parental discipline, the criminal histories of parents and family size and income. Popular theories in the 1950s and 1960s related juvenile delinquency to material deprivation, broken homes and to the growing number of 'latch key' children who were left unsupervised after school while their mothers went to work. All of these presaged current concerns with discipline and the role of single-parent families. What has emerged from this research is that some family factors are related to the likelihood of delinquency but that they must be considered in the context of the socio-economic circumstances of the family and the others

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