Holding Parents Responsible for the Anti-Social and Criminal Behaviour of their Children

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Holding Parents Responsible for the Anti-Social and Criminal Behaviour of their Children

The case for holding parents responsible for the anti-social and

criminal behaviour of their children has been long disputed. This

essay will assess whether parents should in fact be held responsible

or whether the child should be punished for their behaviour. Many

areas will be discussed, the first of which will be the historical

context of criminalizing motherhood. The first issue in this section

is whether family factors, such as poor parental supervision, are an

influence on behaviour as investigated by researchers such as the

Committee for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of

Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis in 1816, which will be compared

to modern theorists such as Loeber and Dishon (1983) and Smith and

Stern (1997). Another area to be considered within the historical

context of holding parents responsible will be the idea that crime

runs in families and so if a child is exposed to criminal activity

when growing up, they will turn to criminal activity when they are

older. Other matters to be deliberated are problems with child rearing

methods as researched by Carpenter (1853) which will be compared to

McCord’s (1979) theory of the same idea. Burt’s (1925) ‘The Young

Delinquent’ will also be examined as will Bowlby’s popular theory in

1944 that parental conflict and disrupted families cause delinquency.

The second area will be the theoretical context of criminalizing

motherhood including communitarianism which emphasises that ‘rights

come with responsibilities’. The risk agenda shall also be explored

which is a risk m...

... middle of paper ...

...(Maguire, 2002).

To conclude, I think that parents can be held responsible for the

anti-social and criminal behaviour of their children to a certain

degree but it must be remembered that children have their own minds

once they have learnt right from wrong. I have looked at many theories

including control theory and attachment theory and views from

Carpenter and McCord as well as others.

Bibliography

Internet

University of California (2004) The Development of Informal

Reformatory Sentences for Juvenile Offenders in the Late Eighteenth

and Early Nineteenth Centuries

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/csls/King%20paper.pdf

Books

Clutterbuck, R (1998) Families, Drugs and Crime. London: Macmillan

Press Ltd

Maguire, Muncie & Reiner (2002) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology.

London: Oxford.

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