Evaluating the Main Theories Relating to the Cause of Juvenile Crime

A juveline delinquent is a person who is under the age of 18 that commits an act that would have been charges as a crime if they were over the age of 18. What started as an isolated incident in Tottenham, North London ened up escalating in to full scale riots involving thousands of rioters and police over a 6 day period, firstly spreading across London but also affecting cities as far away as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, ending with 1715 arrests, 354 of which were for those in the age range 10-17, for offences ranging from public disorder to manslaughter. The country reacted with outrage and the incident sparked major debate in to the causes behind juveline crime. In this essay i am going to discuss numerous theories behind the cause of juveline delinquency, in particular the family influence, the biological approach and the social construct theory.

Many believe that it is the family influence that determines whether juvelines offend. The family determines a child’s class and structure. The nourishing process is vital to the formation of a child’s development. Family exerts the most influence on a human being. Disturbances in general family life or in one or both parents can produce a devastating negative impact on a juvenile.

Sociologists Graham + Bowling, analysing statistics from the Home Office Research Study (1995) in to Young People and Crime, state that there are many family influences that causes juvelines to offend. Studied have found a strong correlation between a lack of supervision and offending. It is argued that children who are left to their own devices from a young age and are not subjected to adequate forms of parental discipline are far more likely to commit low level offences such as truency and vandalism when they reach the ages of 11-14. Further studies show that the juvelines that fall in to this category are then four times more likely to come in contact with police or juveline courts at some point before adulthood.

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