“All in the family?” The Relationship Between Sibling Offending and Offending Risk

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the associations between criminality of family members and individual offending. The main focus is on investigating the extent to which criminal offending by siblings is associated with individual offending, as well as the extent to which parental and grandparental offending accounts for this relationship. Methods Using official conviction data on three generations of Dutch individuals who are at elevated risk of offending, multilevel logistic regression analyses were performed. Results The analyses showed that sibling offending increased the risk of individual offending. Parental and grandparental offending only partially accounted for this association. However, parental offending and offending by grandfathers increased the risk of individual offending as well. Furthermore, the analyses showed that offending by brothers and sisters both increased the risk of offending for both men and women. Conclusions Sibling criminality seems to be a risk factor in its own right. Therefore, focusing only on children of criminal parents is insufficient. Furthermore, it was found that almost every subsequent offending family member adds risk for children to offend.

The Role of Heart Rate Levels in the Intergenerational Transmission of Crime

“…Moreover, results from the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS) indicated that parental offending leads to early antisocial and externalizing behavior in their offspring, both directly [19] and indirectly, mediated by parents' depressive symptoms [20], parenting stress and parenting behaviors [21]. Two Dutch intergenerational studies, the Criminal Careers and Life-Course Study (CCLS) and the Transfive study, also provided evidence for the transmission of offending from parents to children [3,5,22] and between siblings [23,24]. Van de Weijer and colleagues [8] also showed that the intergenerational transmission of violent crimes was significantly stronger than the intergenerational transmission of non-violent crimes, within the families of the Transfive study.…”

In-laws or outlaws? Associations between in-law family members’ and individuals’ convictions

“…Apart from rather consistent associations with partner convictions for both males and females, male convictions are associated with having convicted male in-laws (that is, fathers-and brothers-in-law), whereas female convictions are associated with having convicted female in-laws (only mothers-in-law). This may suggest a same-sex spill-over or role-modelling effect, which has been found previously for biological sibling pairs (for example, Huijsmans et al, 2019) and to some extent also for intergenerational transmission of criminal behaviour (that is, transmission is stronger from same-sex parents and children) (for example, Farrington et al, 2017), although findings are not always consistent (for example, Beijers et al, 2017). However, the sex-specific results should be interpreted with some caution because the sample sizes and the number of convicted individuals became small after splitting the sample by gender.…”

Using age difference and sex similarity to detect evidence of sibling influence on criminal offending

“…This nonlinear pattern is consistent with peer influence as we would expect siblings who are very close in age to interact with each other more frequently and intensely, and we would not expect age difference to matter once it gets so large as to render peer processes implausible. This may explain why the study by Beijers et al (2017) failed to detect evidence of moderation by age difference. They used 2.5 years as the cut-off for the smallest age difference.…”

“…This may explain why the study by Beijers et al . (2017) failed to detect evidence of moderation by age difference. They used 2.5 years as the cut-off for the smallest age difference.…”

“…Also, as noted, the study was limited to violent crime, and ignored other forms of criminal offending. Another study from the Netherlands considered all types of criminal offending (mean age at the end of follow-up: 27.3) but did not show evidence of age difference moderating sibling similarity in offending (Beijers, Bijleveld, van de Weijer, & Liefbroer, 2017). The study was based on a relatively small number of sibling pairs (<1000) and was therefore limited to crude age difference cutoffs (2½, 3, and 4 years).…”