Juvenile Delinquency



Article Summary

Juvenile Delinquency

Juvenile delinquency refers to crimes committed by minors. Most legal systems address these behaviours using ad hoc judicial bodies, such as juvenile courts, provided for certain specialties proceedings for prosecution and have specific coercive repression, such as juvenile detention centres. Juvenile delinquency is characterized by groups of children and adolescents located in misery or poverty levels, unemployment, drug trafficking, urban concentration, low education or illiteracy, sexual assaults and family disintegration. These social groups have been denied all human rights such as the right to life, health, education, housing, and the right to development.

Like most types of offenses, crimes committed by juveniles have increased since the mid-twentieth century. There are many theories about the causes of youth crimes, regarded as particularly important within criminology. This is because the number of crimes committed has grown enormously worldwide. Secondly, any theory on the causes of crime should be considered juvenile crime, as adult criminals will probably have made a start in crime when they were young.

Social learning theory

This theory also states that every individual has the possibility to become criminals because our society presents a number of opportunities for illegal actions and activities but one has the option to not get involved. This is the case mostly with young boys, for instance if they are raised in a clean society and have positive role models at home they are more likely to grow up as a good person. On the contrary, if they are raised in a poor neighbourhood where they are surrounded by violence, drugs and gangs each day, it is very likely that they will grow up committing crimes.

Social learning theory implies that criminal behaviour is learned through close relationships with others. It states that children are born good but later learned to be bad. The theory actually emphasizes genetic inheritance as a determinant behaviour. For social learning theory, the character is being formed as the individual receives stimuli from the social environment in which they live and develops. As they gain experience they will encounter greater opportunities provided by their environment (the environment referred to is the relationship the child has with their parents, relatives, adult influences and the other members of the community they serve as models).

This theory proposes that the vast majority of human behaviour is learned by observation. If a boy sees his parents' lashes to others, it is not surprising that the he will also adopt aggressive behaviour for him because his parents are his model. It states that children are born god but later learned to be bad. The theory actually emphasizes genetic inheritance as a determinant behaviour. An experiment was performed which consisted of "the experimenter aggressive acts executed with a plastic doll, throwing it into the air, fist hitting, kicking and pushing, then presented a doll-like children who had observed the behaviour of model, children repeated many of the acts done by the experimenter ". The child receives a variety of environmental stimuli, but not all have the same ...