Contributing Factors to Juvenile Delinquency

Introduction

Juvenile delinquency has and still continues to affect society for as long as crime and humanity have existed. Often times, it is acknowledged that juvenile delinquency is a major problem in todays world and society but not enough attention is put on the causes of juvenile delinquency. There are many contributing factors leading juveniles and young people to commit crimes. For example, many juveniles commit crimes as a result of their upbringing. Many studies were conducted to determine the contributing factors associated with juvenile delinquency. However, few have looked at factors affecting juvenile delinquency such as depression, traumatic childhood experiences, psychological mental issues, family and peers influences, parental relationships amongst many other things.

Studies have shown that a child does not just commit a crime but something prior to committing the crime has taken place which lead to their delinquency (Freeman 1996) A child can commit a crime simply as a result of what they were taught. For example, many children were raised aggressively and as a result of the constant aggressiveness they have witness in the home; it caused them to fall into juvenile delinquency (Nelson 2016). In addition, when a child is facing trials such as peer pressure and depression, committing a crime may be the way a child chooses to cope with their issues and that may not be a good strategy. This research will aim at exploring specific factors that leads to children and youths committing crimes. African American students from Virginia State University will be an asset to the study by collecting data from them based on their responses from the one on one interview about their past childhood experiences.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore the contributing factors of juvenile delinquency. This study is used as a platform to closely examine why juveniles commit crimes and how to decreased the frequency of juvenile delinquency.In some cases, people may not know what takes place before a juvenile commits a crime.The assumption that can be made is that child is just bad. However, many authors have not explored the causes and factors leading to this child so-called bad behavior For example, some of the factors that can increase juvenile delinquency are, depression, peer pressure , parental relationships, a child's environment, amongst many other factors. In addition, factors such as depression can play a crucial leading role in delinquent behavior in children and youth. Therefore, this study will examine several factors pertaining to juvenile delinquency. To further execute this study, undergraduate students from Virginia State University; all of which will be African Americans will participate in this research and answer questions in a one-on-one interview.

Literature Review

Youths who have been or are sexual offenders often times have history with these kind of people in their family . A study done by authors Yoder, Dillard and Leibowitz examined how family environments including substance use, mental health, physical and emotional victimization experiences, attachment, and parenting styles differ from subgroups of youth offenders including youth sexual offenders. The researchers used participants sexual victimization histories, and nonsexual offenders without sexual victimization histories (Yoder , Dillard, Leibowitz 2017). Youth sexual offenders were (n = 179) and without (n = 176) sexual victimization histories, and nonsexual offenders without sexual victimization histories (n = 150). The results show that youth sexual offenders with sexual victimization histories were put at a greater risks of becoming a juvenile due to their family experiences and family environments as opposed to nonsexual offenders who has no sexual victimization histories.

Child abuse has been looked at as a cause to delinquency in many children. Suman Kaka conducted research on child abuse and he gathered his information from records of substantiated abuse in the Florida Protective Services System's Department of Children, Youth, and Families. The records were used to examine the effects of child abuse and delinquency. The control group was based off of gender, age, and ecumenic status was used to compare the delinquency rates among children who were abused and children who were not abused. The abused group has 56% higher delinquency referral rate than the control group. The abused males have 76% higher referral rates than the control males and the abused females have 32.5% higher referral rate which shows the abused children had a higher delinquency referral rate ( Kaka 1996).

A child's experiences growing up can lead to maladaptive behaviors some of which are known as serious, violent, and chronic (SVC) delinquency (Perez, Jennings, Baglivio , 2016). Data was used from 64,329 Florida Department of Juvenile Justice youth and was collected from the year 2007 to 2012. The reason the researchers did that was to examine both the direct and indirect effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on SVC.

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