How does the failure of family leads to crime?

Failure of family leads to crime

The most direct source of youth criminality has been identified as family’s failure to gratify needs and provide necessary emotional support to maintain social control, and to effectively transmit the dominant values of society.

A young person of 16-25 years of age is still so dependent on his family that he requires love, affection and sympathy of both parents. Emotional deprivation comes from father’s and mother’s lack of interest in the welfare of the young person.

However, if the young person is married, his adjustment with his partner can provide him the necessary emotional security, though the failure of marriage can also create new stresses.

With change in family structure, family ties have presumably got loosened, with the consequent weakening of the family’s ability to transmit moral values. The absence or decline of cohesiveness in the family and its resultant weakness as a control factor are easily discernible in the behaviour of the family members, particularly young persons.

Some youths are so ill-treated, beaten, harassed, humiliated or neglected by their parents that their life becomes miserable. When this kind of treatment goes on for a long time, they begin to resist.

This resistance makes their parents even more tyrannical and they resort to chastising them mercilessly even for trivial reasons. With bitter spirit, the youths decide to leave their homes, and are occasionally forced to adopt a violent way of life as a direct result of the violence of their parents.

My study, however, did not reveal many cases of this type of family situation in the youth criminals. About 70 per cent respondents described their relations with their parents as harmonious, 14 per cent as conflicting, while 17 per cent described their parents’ attitude towards them as indifferent or negligent.

These figures point out that family control and discipline in a large number of cases in my study were effective. I also did not come across cases in my study in which the youth offenders had acquired their attitude towards or technique of criminality from the family.

No respondent described his father, mother or siblings or any other family member as having a criminal record. This fact too points to the absence of role of the family in youth’s criminality.

Taking all these three factors in their totality, namely, emotional deprivation factor, control or discipline factor, and learning factor, it may be said that family situation is only made a scapegoat for youth criminality, while, in truth a youth does not necessarily become a criminal because of his family.

He becomes a criminal of his own volition; or it may be said that the youth’s own demoralisation and lack of self-discipline appear to be more decisive factors in his criminality.