Juvenile Delinquency: Causes And Prevention

   

Juvenile delinquency means the engagement of a child or minor (under 18 years old) in illegal, criminal and antisocial behaviour or action. Such actions include: murder, arson, armed robbery, drug trafficking, currency trafficking, child trafficking, banditry and terrorism etc. Juvenile delinquency did not begin today. It has been taking place across the nations and regions of the world for centuries, with disastrous consequences for individuals, families, communities and nations. What are the causes of juvenile delinquency? What are the impacts of juvenile delinquency on the global society? What are the preventive measures against juvenile delinquency? Let us look at the causes of juvenile delinquency. They are as follows:

 

1. Family dynamics: Family dynamics are the greatest causes of juvenile delinquency. Children who are raised in families with regular domestic violence are vulnerable to juvenile delinquency. When the parents are quarreling and fighting in the presence of their children, the children will learn their habit of fighting and quarreling. They become hostile to peers and disobedient to school authority. They become cruel and antagonistic to everybody and they threaten to fight and stab people with knives both at schools and neighborhoods. In the process of showing their anger and frustration to the public, they may end up killing someone with or without the least provocation. Child neglect by careless parents can lead to juvenile delinquency. Children without caring parents are like sheep without shepherd. The predators will feed large on them at their disposal. When parents are not available to teach their children how to lead quality lifestyles, the children will be misled by peers and playgroups at schools. Another family factor which leads to juvenile delinquency is poverty. When the parents are poor, they won't be able to feed the children, cloth them, pay hospital bills, school fees, and others. Once the family is in destitution, the children may join bad gangs in order to feed themselves. They may end up joining an armed robbery gang due to the huge amount of money that they will get after each successful operation. They won't remember the death penalty that awaits them if caught robbing with arms. Lack of residential home can also lead a child into juvenile delinquency. When a child lives on the street due to poor economic and social conditions, he resorts to hooliganism as the only source of sustenance and existence. Children from broken homes are in miserable conditions. They are vulnerable to many antisocial activities. Single parenting in particular is the modern monster which is killing the children of this century. How can a single parent, husband or wife alone raise up a child? It's very difficult! A single parent husband will surely find it very hard, if not impossible, to successfully raise up a daughter, and vice versa! For example, if a single parent father is living with her young daughter under the age of puberty, he can do everything successfully for the daughter. But, once the young girl begins to see her monthly menstrual discharge, I am telling you that the man won't be able to cope with it the way his wife or a woman would have done. It therefore means that children are better raised up by both parents than single parent father or single parent mother. The US Department of Justice said that children raised up by single parents are too vulnerable to delinquent actions than those raised up in two-parent homes.

2. Social interactions: Peers influence leads to juvenile delinquency. Constant association with peers and playgroups with moral destitution and questionable characters can lead to juvenile delinquency. Man has four developmental stages: childhood, teenage, adolescence and adulthood. Values, ideals, good mannerisms, etiquettes, and civic responsibilities are inculcated into children at childhood age if their parents, caregivers, and guardians are the types which has interest in proper child development. At childhood stage, parents and families play vital roles in child's development. As the child grows into teenage and adolescent stage, he/ she begins to re-define his or her own identity and to establish himself or herself. From the moment the child leaves home and parents to attend college somewhere, he or she begins to mix up with children from other  various backgrounds at school. The child or teenager may be unlucky to be surrounded by children from broken homes or of regular domestic violence between husbands and wives.  By so doing, the influence of parents and families, including all the lofty ideals that the child was taught at home are automatically displaced and replaced by the influence of peers and friends and society. Hence, the imitation of other people's behaviours can easily lead to juvenile delinquency. In that case, the child may indulge into smoking and drunkenness, hard drug addiction, armed robbery, banditry, insurgency and terrorism etc. 

 3. Risk factors: Risk factors such as poverty, homelessness and unfavourable environment can motivate children to engage in juvenile delinquency. For example, many children who became street boys and girls were forced into low lives because their parents were indigent. Human beings tend to do odd things to survive when they are facing hunger and privations. Many years ago, I went to one Police Station to bail somebody. I saw two boys who climbed the high tension utility pylon to cut the wires and sell to users in order to generate money for feeding. Unfortunately for them, they fell down from almost 50ft height  to the ground. One died instantly! The other thief had his thigh bone (fermur) broken into two  and seen openly. The boy said that he had not eaten any food for two straight days because his parents had no jobs. From the way I saw him, I do not think he survived it! Hunger can drive most human beings into evil practices. Not only that, homelessness can contribute to juvenile delinquency. Homeless or street children usually resort to hooliganism and vandalism as means of survival just like those two ill-fated thieves who were so fearless to climb lofty utility pylons to vandalize it. Living in poor environment can also facilitate indulgence into juvenile delinquency. Bad environments are always used as hideouts for thieves and criminals.

 

 The consequences of juvenile delinquency are painful and myriad. They include arrests, detentions, imprisonments, poor education,  rise in crime rates, deaths, unemployment due to lack of qualifications, strained relationships, social stigmatization, loss of self-esteem, and Governments' expenditures in building several correctional homes and penitentiaries, feeding, and health bills of inmates etc. The cost of keeping the deliquents in particular, is usually very high in many countries. For example, the US Department of Juvenile Justice And Deliquency Prevention has said that the estimated annual cost of juvenile justice services in the United States is approximately $22 billion. Can you see the whoopping amount of money spent yearly for combating the menace of juvenile delinquency?

 

To mitigate juvenile delinquency to a clinical level, it is important to set up proactive preventive and intervention measures. There should be a holistic approach to provide family-based intervention strategy called Functional Family Training and Foster Care.The goal of this intervention programme is to enhance family relationship, proper parental skills, alleviate poverty, mediation of home conflicts, and other solutions to dramatically peg down the risk of juvenile delinquency. Governments should also address the problems of unemployment, illiteracy, systemic inequality, national child development schemes to arm parents, guardians, and caregivers with information and tools to train their children.
Governments of the countries of the world should build crime prevention centres. At the crime prevention centres, both children and youths shall be given opportunity to participate in different sports, seminars and workshops, and other life-transforming activities so as to develop physically and mentally. The said juvenile delinquency prevention centres should be imbued with the responsibilities of rehabilitating and re-socializing former juvenile prisoners as well as strengthening institutional development of mediation. The prevention centres should be obligatory to providing jobs for the children and youths caught in the web of juvenile misconducts so that they will withdraw forthwith from delinquency. The juvenile delinquents should be assisted and encouraged to begin law-abiding lifestyles so as to forge ahead to successful future life of bliss and contentment.

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