Predicting adult violent delinquency: Gender differences regarding the role of childhood behaviour

Abstract

Adult violent delinquency harms individuals, their families and society at large. Knowledge about childhood predictors of adult delinquency could be helpful in defining at-risk children who will develop into violent adults. This topic is rarely investigated in females. We investigated which behavioural problems in childhood predicted long-term disruptive development in a sample of both males and females. In 1983, behaviour problems were assessed in a community sample of 2076 children; 24 years later, 1335 of these children, who are now adults, reported on their violent delinquency. Girls with conduct problems were at risk of long-term disruptive development. We recommend that health professionals be alert regarding girls with conduct problems, because early identification and treatment of high-risk girls might reduce delinquency in adult life.

Problem coping skills, psychosocial adversities and mental health problems in children and adolescents as predictors of criminal outcomes in young adulthood

“…The present findings are in accordance with previous community-based studies underlining the role of externalizing psychopathology and substance abuse in adolescence as major predictors of criminal convictions in adulthood [8,10,15,16,22,29,36,39,44,51]. These studies also indicate that, besides criminal behaviours (e.g., stealing or firesetting), other externalizing problems without a direct relation to crime such as lying, temper tantrums, and swearing are also related to adult crimes.…”

“…Irrespective of differences in design and methodology, several population-based studies were able to consistently link child and adolescent conduct problems to later criminal outcomes in adulthood [4,8,10,15,16,22,29,36,39,44,51]. Another risk factor was substance abuse, with community-based studies reporting that early drug use, including alcohol use, were related to later criminal outcomes [5,10,21,51].…”

“…However, none of these methods will provide a complete picture of crime. In previous studies, self-reported delinquency questionnaires [8,14,16,29,36,39,51], police reports [22,44], official charges [10] or convictions [14,22,36] were used to measure criminal outcomes in adulthood. Few studies have reported both self-reported and official information on criminal behaviours [14,36].…”

“…Due to socioeconomic and cultural differences, psychosocial risk factors including SES, migration background, familial and other social stressors and child rearing styles may have a different impact in various countries. Given the findings of previous international studies, it was hypothesized that problematic alcohol use, drug abuse and externalizing mental health problems constitute universal risk factors for later criminal behaviour [4,8,10,15,16,22,29,36,39,44,51]. We also analysed the interaction between sex of the proband and other predictors and then tested an abbreviated 6 externalizing problem scale without the items indicating a specific relationship to criminal behaviours.…”

Conduct Problems and Adherence to COVID-19 Guidelines: A Developmental Psychopathology-Informed Approach

“…Gender paradox theory suggests that while boys are more likely to have conduct problems than girls, the consequences of conduct problems are more severe among girls (Loeber & Keenan, 1994). Indeed, the consequences of conduct problems in terms of substance use (Loeber & Keenan, 1994;Pedersen et al, 2001) and adult violent behavior (Reef et al, 2011), may be greater for girls than boys, although not all findings confirm significant gender differences (Fergusson et al, 2005;Wertz et al, 2018). With regards to COVID-19 guideline adherence, some research suggests that women are generally more likely to adhere to public health guidelines than men in normative samples (Nivette et al, 2020;Zajenkowski et al, 2020), although these differences are not large and other work finds no significant differences (O'Connell et al, 2020).…”