Child Maltreatment & Delinquency Relationship

The purpose of this article is to connect the methods, discipline, and theories of social work with adolescents to the wider field of the influence of government policy on crime. The way in which this connection is made is through a review of previous research into the causes of juvenile delinquency, but the real message is a critique of policies that tend to be preoccupied with juveniles that are placed into the juvenile justice system. Basically these authors are saying that the debate over the causes of juvenile crime has been focused on the dynamics of crime and punishment as observed in the judicial system. In other words the lionÆs share of attention is being given to juveniles who have been identified as offenders and who may be facing punishment for their crimes. Much less attention is being given to heading off crimes in the first place--finding the causes before they become transformed by juvenile actions into crimes.

The relevance of this for the public in general is that tax resources are being funneled into the activities and programs associated with punishments. While the authors seem to realize that there is a necessity to make this whole system as efficient and fair as possible, their real point is that this will not necessarily mean that the number of juvenile offenses will decrease. The relevance of that argument

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se they are so sharply divided about strategies and methods for doing so. No one can say with a certainty which strategy or method is most likely to be successful, but few seem willing to agree on a definite course of research action. What remains--and what Schwartz, et al., are arguing is the real need--is the project of finding ways to identify offending youths who could become career criminals in the first place. But the article concludes that juvenile-delinquency theory is in a condition of crisis, which does not help fix the problem of juvenile crime. The authors say that there is a "desperate need to allocate more funds to explore strategies most likely to prevent and control serious juvenile crimes, particularly violence. One hopes that such knowledge will be developed before the end of this century" (655). But advocacy for after-the-fact punishment seems to be winning the resource battle; the remedies to this perceived social problem by no means allocate sufficient resources to research on what could be called the front end of juvenile crime, where intervention in the form of counseling and redirection of adolescent energy might usefully occur. Most resources, and a good deal of public-policy discourse, are directed towar
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1524
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)