Female Delinquent Theory Essay Research Paper Who

Female Delinquent Theory Essay, Research Paper

Who is the typical female delinquent. What causes her to get into trouble. What happens to her if she is caught. These are questions that few members of the general public could answer quickly. By contrast, almost every citizen can talk about delinquency, by which they generally mean male delinquency, and can even generate some fairly specific complaints about, for example, the failure of the juvenile justice system to deal with such problems as the alarming increase in the rate of serious juvenile crime and the fact that the juvenile courts are too lenient on juveniles found guilty of these offenses.

This situation should come as no surprise since even the academic study of delinquent behavior has, for all intents and purposes, been the study of male delinquency. The delinquent is a rogue male stated by Albert Cohen in his influential book on gang delinquency. A decade later, Travis Hirschi, with his equally important book entitled The Causes of Delinquency, regulated women and suggested in a somewhat apologetic manner that in analysis that follows, the non-Negro becomes white, and the girls disappear.

This pattern of neglect is not all that unusual. All areas of social inquiry have been notoriously gender blind. What is perhaps less well understood is that theories developed to describe the misbehavior of working-class male youth fail to capture the full concept of delinquency in America; and are inadequate when it comes to explaining female misbehavior and official reactions to girls deviance.

Specifically, delinquent behavior involves a range of activities far broader than those committed by the stereotypical street gang. Also, many more young people than the visibly group of troublemakers that exist on every intermediate and high school campus commit some sort of juvenile offense and many of these youth have brushes with the law. One study revealed that 33% of all the boys and 14% of the girls born in 1958 had at least one contact with the police before reaching their eighteenth birthday. Indeed, some forms of serious delinquent behavior such as drug and alcohol abuse, are far more frequent than the stereotypical delinquent behavior of gang fighting and vandalism and appear to cut across class and gender lines.

Studies that take from youth themselves the volume of their delinquent behavior consistently suggests that large numbers of adolescents engage in at least some form of misbehavior that could result in their arrest. As a consequence, it is largely trivial misconduct, rather than the commission of serious crime, that shapes the actual nature of juvenile delinquency. One national study of youth aged 15-21, for example, noted that only 5% reported involvement in a serious assault, and only 6% reported having participated in a gang fight. In contrast, 81% admitted to having used alcohol, 44% admitted to having used marijuana, 37% admitted to having been publicly drunk, 42% admitted to having skipped classes, 44% admitted having sexual intercourse, and 15% admitted to having stolen from their families.

Indeed, an important point to understand about the nature of delinquency, and particularly female delinquency, is that youth can be taken into custody for both criminal acts and a wide variety of what are called status offenses. These offenses allow for the arrest of youth for a wide range of behaviors that are violations of parental authority: running away from home, being a person in need of supervision, being incorrigible, beyond control, truant, in need of care and protection, and so on. Juvenile delinquents, then, are youths arrested for either criminal or non-criminal status offenses.

Looking at girls who find their way into juvenile court populations, it is apparent that status offenses continue to play an important role in the character of girls official delinquency. In total, 34% of the girls, but only 12% of the boys, were referred in court in 1983 for these offenses. Stating these figures, while males comprised 81% of all delinquency referrals, females constituted 46% of all status offenders in court. And fifteen years earlier, about half of the girls and about 20% of the boys were referred to court for these offenses. This data seems to signal a decrease in female status offense referrals, but not a dramatic increase as some may have believed.

For some time statistics showing large numbers of girls arrested and referred for status offenses were taken to be representative of the different types of male and female delinquency. However, self-reported studies of male and female delinquency do not reflect the dramatic differences in misbehavior found in official statistics. It appears that girls charged with these non-criminal status offenses have been and continue to be significantly over-represented in court population.

Teilmann and Landry (1981) compared girls contribution to arrests for runaway and incorrigibility with girls self-reports of these two activities, and found a 10.4% overrepresentation of females among those arrested for runaway and a 30.9% overrepresentation in arrests for incorrigibility. This data finds that girls are arrested for status offenses at a higher rate than boys, when contrasted to their self-reported delinquency rates. Similarly, a national youth survey in 1982 found that there was no evidence of greater female involv