The Research On The Causes Of Male Juvenile Delinquency In The Perspective Of Developmental Criminology

Statistics on offending at home and abroad have found that the peak phenomenon of juvenile delinquency; that is, the rate of juvenile delinquency is much higher than other age groups. According to developmental criminology, different age groups have different reasons. So, the childhood and the youth have different factors which mainly include biological, psychological and social factors. Moffit(t1993)supposed juvenile delinquency concealed two distinct categories of individuals:life-course-persistent offenders and adolescent-limited offenders. The former's some neuro-psychological problems (such as low self-control) interact cumulatively with their criminogenic environments(such as poor family and school factors) across development, which results in antisocial behaviors ;For the latter, a contemporary maturity gap encourages teens to mimic antisocial behavior in ways that are normative and adjustive. According to Moffitt, the maturity gap problem means that in adolescence the youth have the demand for adult roles because of the physiological maturity, but this demand are limited by society, which causes the juvenile delinquency. This study aims to explore the causes of juvenile delinquency from five aspects which include individual self-control, parenting style, school adjustment, peer relationships and maturity gap.In this study, 181 male delinquents aged 15-21 from the Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents in Shanghai were investigated by questionnaire. By correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis, the study investigated the respective risk factors in childhood and youth. Meanwhile, 18 life-course-persistent offenders and 44 adolescent-limited offenders were selected. Then, we compared the differences between them in risk factors, and try to look for the major predicting variables by correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis. The findings were as follows:(1) The rates for prevalence of juvenile delinquency soar high. In adolescent years, the number of people involved in juvenile delinquency increased significantly. Besides, the delinquency in adolescence is much more serious than that in childhood. (2) There are same risk factors between childhood and adolescence, but there are some different ones between them. Peer relationships can significantly predict the delinquency of childhood, particularly the variable "having deviant friends". Both the early factors (self-control, parenting style and school adjustment), and the adolescent factors (peer relationships and maturity gap) can predict juvenile delinquency, which include: " perseverance","the emotional alienation from the father" , "sensual needs", "having deviant friends" , "bad way to make friends" and "Mother's support ".(3)In view of the limited sample size, the life-course-persistent offenders are different from the adolescent-limited offenders in two variables. The former prefer to seeking sensation and having deviant friends.(4) For the life-course-persistent offenders, the variable "the mother's lack of supervision" can be a significant negative predictor of their offending.(5) For adolescent-limited offenders, the two variables "sensual needs" and "sensual limitation" can significantly predict their offending.