DISENTANGLING THE LINK BETWEEN DISRUPTED FAMILIES AND DELINQUENCY

The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development is a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 South London males from age 8 to age 46. Delinquency rates were higher among 75 boys who were living in permanently disrupted families on their fifteenth birthday, compared to boys living in intact families. Results were very similar whether juvenile convictions, juvenile self-reported delinquency or adult convictions were studied. Delinquency rates were similar in disrupted families and in intact high conflict families. Boys who lost their mothers were more likely to be delinquent than boys who lost their fathers, and disruptions caused by parental disharmony were more damaging than disruptions caused by parental death. Boys from disrupted families who continued living with their mothers had similar delinquency rates to boys from intact harmonious families. These results are more concordant with life course theories rather than with trauma theories or selection theories of the effects of family disruption. Broken Homes and Delinquency Fuelled by the increasing instability of marital relationships since the 1960s, which has led to ever-increasing proportions of children experiencing disruption of their family life, the last three decades have witnessed a massive increase in research into the effect of parental separation and divorce on children. Within criminology, ‘the topic of broken homes has been a central part of delinquency theory since the emergence of criminology in the 19th century’ (Wells and Rankin 1991: 71). Rising juvenile crime rates coinciding with this increase in family instability provided an added impetus to carry out research into the link between disrupted families and delinquency. In this paper, we will discuss some of the complexities involved in analysing the association, and review explanations put forward to account for it. We will then test these explanations using data collected in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, which is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 South London males from age 8 to age 46. Early research up to the 1960s (e.g. Douglas et al. 1968; Glueck and Glueck 1950) revealed a considerably higher incidence of family disruption among delinquents convicted of criminal offences than among the non-delinquent population. American research from the 1950s suggested that a large part of the relation might reflect differential treatment by the police and courts (Wilkinson 1974); arguably, because two-parent homes were thought to be better able to provide supervision, youths from such homes were less often brought to court than were those from disrupted families. Nye’s (1958) study of high school students in Washington State, for example, revealed that the relationship between broken homes and delinquency was much reduced using self-reports. An

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