Parental Deprivation, Family Background and Female Delinquency

Abstract

The purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly as a contribution to the literature of female delinquency, a subject that has attracted little contemporary attention, with one notable exception, the essentially psychiatric study of a year's intake into a classifying Approved School by Cowie, Cowie and Slater (1968). Secondly as an examination of the hypothesis that early adverse experiences are related to female delinquency in particular and to behaviour disturbance in general.

Birth order and youth delinquent behaviour testing the differential parental control hypothesis in a french representative sample

“…These authors compared 500 delinquent boys to a control group, matched on criteria of age, gender, IQ, ethnic and social background, and observed a higher proportion of middle-born children in their sample of delinquents (see, for similar results, Lee and Newson, 1954;Hirschi, 1969;West and Farrington, 1973;Leflore, 1988). These observations may be contrasted to discordant findings which either do not verify any effect of ordinal position (Ferguson, 1952;Johanson, 1968;Barry and Barry, 1969), or report inconsistent effects whereby later-borns would be more (Berg et al, 1967) or less (Biles, 1971;Koller, 1971) engaged in deviance. Such inconsistencies suggest that the effects of ordinal position on delinquency are modulated by factors that were not systematically controlled in previous research.…”

Determinants of Delinquency in Female West Indian Migrants

“…It has been shown that disruptive parental homes are as equally distributed as inadequate ones, and that these factors are not associated with a recidivist course or with any other factor. In Australia, Koller (1971) made an investigation of the significance of separation experience in delinquency among girls at a training school. Parental loss and deprivation was five times more prevalent for delinquents, compared with controls; a half experienced this loss before reaching school age and one-third experienced a second loss during childhood.…”

“…at MOUNT ALLISON UNIV on June 25, 2015 isp.sagepub.com Downloaded from However, when Koller (1971) studied this problem among 121 girls at a training sehool, he found maternal loss no more prevalent than paternal loss. This suggest that subsequent separation experiences interact with previous ones in precipitating delinquency and depression.…”

Women, Crime and Criminal Justice: The State of Current Theory and Research in Australia and New Zealand

“…For example, Koller (1971); Koller and Castanos (1969). 24 Willson (1979) supplies some background data on women prisoners in New South Wales.…”