Divorce affects children negatively — Youth criminality

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Part of the series ‘Communism → second-wave feminism → social re-engineering’
Index and preamble for series

The effects of divorce on children

Divorce affects children negatively. This is an excerpt from a report on The Effects of Divorce on Children.  The excerpt presents information on how different family structures compare with respect to the outcomes in children in relation to youth incarceration rates.  It makes for interesting reading, especially for anyone who still thinks that the problem identified by Betty Friedan and cohort has no name.

The Effects of Divorce on Children

Here is an excerpt from that:

»V. Effects on Government: Increased Crime, Abuse, and Use of Drugs

A. Increased Crime Rates

Robert Sampson (then professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) reported, after studying 171 cities in the United States with populations over 100,000, that the divorce rate predicted the robbery rate of any given area, regardless of its economic and racial composition. In these communities, he found that lower divorce rates indicated higher formal and informal social controls (such as the supervision of children) and lower crime rates.²³⁷ In 1994, it was reported in Wisconsin that the incarceration rate of juvenile delinquents was 12 times higher among children of divorced parents than among children of married parents.²³⁸ In a British longitudinal study of males aged eight to 32, David P. Farrington, professor of criminology at Cambridge University, found experiencing parental divorce before age 10 to be a major predictor of adolescent delinquency and adult criminality.²³⁹ Adolescents from divorced families (particularly those in divorced single-father families) display more antisocial and violent behavior than adolescents in biologically intact families.²⁴⁰ An Australian parliamentary review of the literature found that divorce increases the likelihood that children will feel hostility and rejection.²⁴¹….« —More p. 34

Family Structure — Comparative Youth Incarceration Rates

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237. Robert J. Sampson, “Crime in Cities: The Effects of Formal and Informal Social Control,” in Communities and Crime, vol. 8, Crime and Justice, ed. Albert J. Reiss and Michael Tonry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 271-311. 
238. Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services, Division of Youth Services, “Family Status of Delinquents in Juvenile Correctional Facilities in Wisconsin” (1994). The data from the report were merged with Current Population Survey data on family structure
     in Wisconsin for that year to derive rates of incarceration by family structure.
239. David P. Farrington, “Implications of Criminal Career Research for the Prevention of Offending,” Journal of Adolescence 13 (1990): 93-113.
240. Kyrre Breivik and Dan Olweus, “Adolescent’s Adjustment in Four Post-Divorce Family Structures: Single Mother, Stepfather, Joint Physical Custody and Single Father Families,”
     Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 44, no. 3 (2006): 114. 
241. Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives, Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, To Have and To Hold: Strategies to Strengthen Marriage and Relationships (Canberra, Australia, Parliament of Australia: 1998), 36.

It is seems that the possibility that divorce affects children negatively ranked low on the priority list of Betty Friedan and cohort, when they did their best to launch the deconstruction of the family, no matter the cost.  What were they thinking?

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