Female Delinquency and Broken Homes: A Re-assessment

Abstract

The above statement contained in the Task Force Report on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime has been well documented by empirical data. For the most part, inquiries into the motivational factors in female delinquency have the family as a common focus. Several decades of research have produced evidence suggesting that female delinquency is largely attributable to deficient family relationships which require that the girl seek compensatory affectional responses outside the home. For example, Monahan found that both male and female delinquents are less likely to come from intact family backgrounds than their nondelinquent counterparts, but that “among the females the proportions from incomplete families are so high that there can hardly be any doubt as to the importance of parental deprivation to them” (1957: 258). Similar observations may be found in more recent studies (Trese, 1962; Morris, 1964; Cockburn and Maclay, 1965; Cowie et a1., 1968; Adamek and Dager, 1969; Cloninger and Guze, 1970; and Reige, 1972).

But the most common observation about the differential effect of the broken home has been that delinquent girls come from broken homes more often than delinquent boys [Rodman and Grams, 1976: 176]