NCJ Number
138709
Journal
Youth and Society Volume: 24 Issue: 1 Dated: (September 1992) Pages: 3-30
Date Published
1992
Length
28 pages
Annotation
This article presents a model that reclaims the community as an important context of female behavior, both legitimate and illegitimate.
Abstract
The intent of the model is not to create a separate contextual paradigm for the explanation of female delinquency, but rather to establish the relevance of community structural dimensions for two distinct theories of women's criminal behavior. The community model developed by the author has the advantages of being parsimonious and separating population from organizational dimensions. Two population dimensions, poverty and mobility, are part of the model, as are three organizational characteristics: informal organization, formal organization, and linkages. Under the model, poverty is expected to negatively affect a community's capability to create and maintain secondary groups and continuous linkages, because both depend on material resources. Mobility rather than poverty is expected to limit the viability of primary groups and to facilitate linkages. The advantage of the model is that it pushes the study of communities beyond the traditional focus on the urban underclass. This permits the exploration of the independent effects of population and organizational factors, often nonvariant in the studies of low-income urban communities. This article reviews various explanatory traditions of female delinquent behavior to serve as an initial conceptual grounding for relative female delinquency rates within the community typology. 2 figures, 9 notes, and 105 references