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Gender Differences in Pathways to Delinquency: the Impact of Family Relationships and AdolescentDepression

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Abstract

Purpose

The current study examined gender differences in pathways bridging childhood exposure to family violence, adolescent family relationships, adolescent depression, and juvenile delinquency.

Methods

The study follows 296 families participating in a longitudinal study on the impact of exposure to family violence on child development. The present analyses include youth (150 girls and 146 boys) who were interviewed over three waves of data collection. Multi-group structural equation models tested whether the pathways between childhood and adolescent family risk factors, adolescent depression, and delinquency statistically differed by gender.

Results

Analyses revealed that for both girls and boys, childhood family violence had no lasting direct effect on juvenile delinquency. Disrupted family relationships in adolescence mediated the relationship between exposure to childhood family violence and delinquency; however, disrupted family relationships were more strongly related to concurrent depressive symptoms for girls than for boys. Lastly, there was a pathway between adolescent depression and subsequent adolescent delinquency, this pathway was not significantly different for girls compared to boys.

Conclusions

The prospective nature of this study highlights the importance of analyzing family relationships and mental health in adolescence when estimating the influence of childhood exposure to family violence on adolescent delinquency. By simultaneously testing boys’ and girls’ models against each other, both similarities and differences in pathways to delinquency were identified.

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Notes

  1. To examine if age may account for some of our findings, we ran our different models controlling for age. The structural parameters for all the variables of interest did not change substantially and none of the pathways that were significant became non-significant (or vice versa).

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (# RO1-MH51428) awarded to Dr. Laura McCloskey, the principal investigator on the research project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Politics, Administration and Justice, California State University, Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton, CA, 92831, USA

    Veronica M. Herrera

  2. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Jeffrey Stuewig

Authors
  1. Veronica M. Herrera
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  2. Jeffrey Stuewig
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Correspondence to Veronica M. Herrera.

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Ethical Standards Statement and Informed Consent

This study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Arizona which ensured that the research was conducted in accordance with all federal, institutional, and ethical guidelines. All mothers provided informed consent and children provided assent to participate. Because of the sensitive nature of some of the questions, in particular about possible child maltreatment, it was explained to mothers and their children that the only condition by which confidentiality would be broken would be if it were revealed that the child was in present physical danger or had experienced serious abuse at some time. When reports of child maltreatment did surface, a full-time staff counselor intervened with the family, and either confirmed that prior reports had been filed to Child Protective Services, or in some cases filed new reports in cooperation with the mothers. Only one mother refused to cooperate and a report was filed independently. Twenty-eight new reports of child abuse were filed during the course of data collection during 1990–1991.

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Herrera, V.M., Stuewig, J. Gender Differences in Pathways to Delinquency: the Impact of Family Relationships and AdolescentDepression. J Dev Life Course Criminology 3, 221–240 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-016-0052-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-016-0052-3

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