All My Children

There are more offences committed per capita in late adolescence and early adulthood than at later age periods, for several reasons. Youths feel a rebellious rivalry with parents, teachers, police and other people in authority. They have a compulsion to prove their courage and independence. Their sexual and aggressive impulses are now fully grown but are not yet fully controlled by the caution that comes—fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—with experience.

If we want to understand the various kinds of offences for which youths can be charged, we should separate them. First I’ll mention mild delinquencies, of which a good example is petty larceny, which is snitching an apple from the stand in front of a fruit shop or a few pieces of timber at a building site. Studies have shown that four out of five respectable male citizens did such things at least once during adolescence, usually in a group, but that most of them had the good luck not to get caught. Such offences are motivated by the heightened masculine aggressiveness of adolescence (girls rarely commit them), or a need to prove one’s boldness (a dare is often involved). Only a small proportion of boys are brought up strictly enough so that they wouldn’t do any of these things.

A moderately serious offence would be a group of boys breaking into a school and deliberately destroying a lot of property. This is called vandalism. It requires considerably more hostility and aggression than most boys have, and less conscience. Incidentally, it also probably means that the school people as a group (or the particular teacher if only one room was vandalised) are hostile to the children of the neighbourhood. Another serious offence would be a group of boys from comfortable homes carrying out a series of burglaries of neighbourhood shops. In spite of the fact that the families are ‘respectable’ according to the newspapers, you can be sure that the parents have consciences less reliable than those of their neighbours or that they have neglected or mishandled their sons.

Armed robbery, which might end in shooting, and rape, both of which are very serious offences, are generally carried out only by boys who had been raised with little love and a lot of cruelty.

Girls tend to commit offences which are quite different from boys, and which show how different their basic natures are. They run away from home when they feel unappreciated and resentful, and this of course makes their parents frantic with worry and embarrassment. Usually in the background there is inadequate affection and a lot of family strain. The girls involved are often immature and self-centred.

Another common offence for girls is sexual delinquency.

A defiant girl may be keeping company with a man her parents consider no good, and her parents turn to the police and courts in their efforts to get her back under their control. There are other girls who scandalise their parents and the neighbours by appearing to be promiscuous with a variety of men. In these situations, too, there has often been too little love and too few standards.

So girls tend not to defy the law with aggression directed against society, like boys. They take a personal kind of revenge against their parents by worrying them and shaming them, often using their sexuality as the weapon.

Girls from mildly delinquent families may participate in shoplifting. In ordinary shoplifting, the objects stolen are of definite use or value to the person. But there is another variety called kleptomania in which a girl keeps taking more of the same object, which may have no practical usefulness at all. One favourite object of kleptomaniacs is pens—sometimes a girl will steal dozens and dozens of them. Some kleptomaniacs are financially well off and could easily buy the things they risk social disgrace by stealing. They have no idea why they keep stealing the same thing—it’s a mysterious craving. But psychoanalysis has shown that in the unconscious the repeatedly stolen object has great symbolic significance.

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