The number of juvenile offenders admitted to Malaysian prisons is alarming. The purpose of this paper is to determine the presence of any psychiatric disorders and their association with personal characteristics of juvenile detainees in prisons across Peninsular Malaysia.
There is little doubt that family factors can influence involvement in delinquency, although the full nature and extent of their influences remain unclear. In recent decades, testosterone has been increasingly implicated as a contributor to adolescent offending. The present study sought to determine whether two important types of familial factors--parental socioeconomic status and amicable parent-child relationships--are interacting with testosterone (and possibly other androgens) to affect delinquency. A large sample of North American college students self-reported their involvement in eight categories of delinquency along with self-ratings of various androgen-promoted traits (e.g., muscularity and low-deep voice), parental social status, and the quality of the relationships they had with parents. In both sexes, parent-child relationships and androgens were significantly associated with delinquency but parental social status was not. Factor analysis revealed that the authors' measures of all four categories of variables exhibited strong loadings onto their respective factors. Androgens and amicable parent-child relationships were associated with delinquency but parental social status was not. About one third of the influence of parent-child relationships on delinquency appeared to be attributable to androgens. Findings are discussed from the perspective of the evolutionary neuroandrogenic theory of delinquent and criminal behavior.
BACKGROUND: Several studies have reported significant positive correlations between smoking during pregnancy by mothers and the involvement of their offspring in criminal/delinquent behaviour later in life, but these findings have been described as modest and the criminality based on official conviction statistics.
AIMS: We sought to verify this relationship and probe for more details on the basis of self-reported offending among college students.
METHODS: Independently completed questionnaires were collected from 6332 students and their mothers. The students provided information about their delinquent acts, if any, according to eight categories. Their mothers provided retrospective reports of their smoking habits, if any, during pregnancy.
FINDINGS: Mothers who recalled having smoked during pregnancy were significantly more likely than non-smoking mothers to have offspring who self-reported engaging in some types of delinquency. This relationship was more evident for female offspring than for male offspring and was most pronounced for illegal drug use by the offspring. There was, however, no relationship between offspring offending and estimated number of cigarettes smoked by mothers, month of pregnancy when smoked or consistency of smoking throughout pregnancy.
CONCLUSION: Overall, our study confirms that maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with offspring involvement in delinquency, but the lack of critical timing or dose-response relationships between maternal smoking and later offspring delinquency cast doubt on the possibility that the associations are due to teratogenic effects of tobacco smoke.
Study site: college students at 20 US and two Canadian universities