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Sparked by high-profile cases involving children who commit violent crimes, public concerns regarding child delinquents have escalated. Compared with juveniles whose delinquent behavior begins later in adolescence, child delinquents (offenders younger than age 13) face a greater risk of becoming serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders. OJJDP formed the Study Group on Very Young Offenders to examine the prevalence and frequency of offending by children younger than 13. This Study Group identified particular risk and protective factors that are crucial to developing effective early intervention and protection programs for very young offenders. This Bulletin is part of OJJDP’s Child Delinquency Series, which presents the findings of the Study Group on Very Young Offenders. This series offers the latest information about child delinquency, including analyses of child delinquency statistics, insights into the origins of very young offending, and descriptions of early intervention programs and approaches that work to prevent the development of delinquent behavior by focusing on risk and protective factors. |
Introduction
Some aspects of children’s behaviors, such as temperament, are established during the first 5 years of life. This foundation, coupled with children’s exposure to certain risk and protective factors, influences the likelihood of children becoming delinquent at a young age. However, the identification of these multiple risk and protective factors has proven to be a difficult task. Although no magic solutions exist for preventing or correcting child delinquency, identifying risk and protective factors remains essential to developing interventions to prevent child delinquency from escalating into chronic criminality.
According to the Study Group on Very Young Offenders, a group of 39 experts on child delinquency and child psychopathology convened by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), risk factors for child delinquency operate in several domains: the individual child, the child’s family, the child’s peer group, the child’s school, the child’s neighborhood, and the media. Most professionals agree that no single risk factor leads a young child to delinquency. Rather, the likelihood of early juvenile offending increases as the number of risk factors and risk factor domains increases.
Although some risk factors are common to many child delinquents, the patterns and particular combination of risk factors vary from child to child. Professionals have learned a great deal about which risk and protective factors are relevant for screening and intervention. For example, most professionals agree that early on in a child’s life, the most important risks stem from individual factors (e.g., birth complications, hyperactivity, sensation seeking, temperamental difficulties) and family factors (e.g., parental antisocial or criminal behavior, substance abuse, and poor child-rearing practices). As the child grows older and becomes integrated into society, new risk factors related to peer influences, the school, and the community begin to play a larger role.
Although focusing on risk factors is important, examining protective factors that reduce the risk of delinquency is as important for identifying interventions that are likely to work. For example, some common protective factors against child delinquency and disruptive behavior are female gender, prosocial behavior (such as empathy) during the preschool years, and good cognitive performance (for example, appropriate language development and good academic performance). The proportion of protective factors to risk factors has a significant influence on child delinquency, and protective factors may offset the influence of children’s exposure to multiple risk factors.
This Bulletin is based on four chapters from the Study Group’s final report, Child Delinquents: Development, Intervention, and Service Needs (Loeber and Farrington, 2001): “Individual Risk and Protective Factors,” “Family Risk and Protective Factors,” “Peer Factors and Interventions,” and “School and Community Risk Factors and Interventions.”
The risk factors for child delinquency discussed in this Bulletin are categorized into four groups: (1) individual, (2) family, (3) peer, and (4) school and community. A greater understanding of these risk and protective factors could serve as the basis for future social policies designed to prevent and control delinquency (see Burns et al., in press, another OJJDP Bulletin in this series).
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Child Delinquency Research: An Overview Historically, delinquency studies have focused on later adolescence, the time when delinquency usually peaks. This was particularly true in the 1990s, when most researchers studied chronic juvenile offenders because they committed a disproportionately large amount of crime. Research conducted during this period by OJJDP’s Study Group on Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders concluded that youth referred to juvenile court for their first delinquent offense before age 13 are far more likely to become chronic offenders than youth first referred to court at a later age. To better understand the implications of this finding, OJJDP convened the Study Group on Very Young Offenders in 1998. Its charge was to analyze existing data and to address key issues that had not previously been studied in the literature. Consisting of 16 primary study group members and 23 coauthors who are experts on child delinquency and psychopathology, the Study Group found evidence that some young children engage in very serious antisocial behavior and that, in some cases, this behavior foreshadows early delinquency. The Study Group also identified several important risk factors that, when combined, may be related to the onset of early offending. The Study Group report concluded with a review of preventive and remedial interventions relevant to child delinquency.The Child Delinquency Bulletin Series is drawn from the Study Group’s final report, which was completed in 2001 under grant number 95–JD–FX–0018 and subsequently published by Sage Publications as Child Delinquents: Development, Intervention, and Service Needs (edited by Rolf Loeber and David P. Farrington). OJJDP encourages parents, educators, and the juvenile justice community to use this information to address the needs of young offenders by planning and implementing more effective interventions. |
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