Family Environment and Delinquency in the Perspective of Etiologic Research

Some members of this audience may be acquainted with Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (2), a work published in 1950. Employing a sample of 500 persistent delinquents and a matched control group of 500 true non-delinquents, both from the most underprivileged areas of Boston, (Massachusetts, U.S.A.), we arrived at certain highly suggestive findings regarding statistically significant differences between the two groups, which carried with them the implication of a complex etiologic involvement. This interplay of forces was summarized in Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency as follows :“The delinquents as a group are distinguishable from the non-delinquents: 1°physically, in being essentially mesomorphic in constitution (solid, closely knit, muscular); 2° temperamentally, in being restlessly energetic, impulsive, extrovorted, aggressive, destructive (often sadistic); 3° in attitude, by being hostile, defiant, resentful, suspicious, stubborn, socially assertive, adventurous, unconventional, non-submissive to authority; 4° psychologically, in tending to direct and concrete, rather than symbolic, intellectual expression, and in being less methodical in their approach to problems; 5° socioculturally, in having been reared to a far greater extent than the control group, in homes of little understanding, affection, stability, or moral fibre, by parents usually unfit to be effective guides and protectors or, according to psycho-analytic theory, desirable sources for emulation and the construction of a consistent, well-balanced, and socially normal superego during the early stages of character development. While in individual cases the stresses contributed by any one of the… pressure-areas of dissocial behaviour tendency may adequately account for persistence in delinquency, in general the high probability of delinquency is dependent upon the interplay of the conditions and forces from all these areas.