NCJ Number
124865
Journal
Child Welfare Volume: 60 Issue: 2 Dated: (February 1981) Pages: 89-94
Date Published
1981
Length
6 pages
Annotation
Research on the link between parental abuse and delinquent behavior of runaways indicates that abuse is more likely to lead to withdrawn, rather than aggressive behavior.
Abstract
This study involved a sample of 5,392 children referred for child abuse to the Arizona Department of Economic Security, Child Protective Services, chosen as the experimental group. The control sample consisted of 900 reported juvenile offenders who did not appear in the child abuse sample. It was found that children who were physically abused and the victims of parental violence in the family were less likely to engage in later aggressive crimes than their siblings and nonabused controls. They were more likely to be arrested for escape acts (truancy, missing juvenile, runaway). These results indicate that abused children are not more aggressive than the controls, but have escape infractions two to three times higher than the controls. An additional finding was the very high number of runaways among the siblings of the physically abused experimental sample compared with the control sample. It appears that violent home life creates a stressful situation leading to runaway behavior for siblings as well as to physically abused children. 20 references.