Children and Crime Midterm

Three Cases that Involved Children as Crime Victims/Perpetrators

Aaron Fisher, Jon Venables & Robert Thompson, Jordan Brown

Three Historical Views on Children

• Original Sin: children are born sinners, child-rearing must provide salvation

• Tabula Rasa: children are born blank slates

• Innate Goodness: children are inherently good and should grow naturally

Three Processes of Development

Biological, Socioemotional, Cognitive

Theories of Child Development

• Freuds Psychosexual Theory

• Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory

• Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

• Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Criminal Homicide

Murder & manslaughter

• murder: planned

• manslaughter: unplanned

  • Non-negligent (voluntary): Willful killing

  • Negligent (involuntary): Killing through gross neglect

The Most Vulnerable Age Groups in Children as Murder Victims

5-6 and 15-17

AMBER Alert System

• Launched in 2001 by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

• Stands for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response” alert

• Named after Amber Hagerman

Meghan’s Law

• Enacted in 1996

• Named after 7-year-old Megan Nicole Kanka, who was raped and murdered by a known sex offender

• Authorizes public notification of the presence of convicted sex offenders

Four Main Levels of Child Maltreatment

• Intrafamilial

  • Within the home

• Extrafamilial

  • Outside the family

• Institutional

  • In the institutional setting

• Societal

  • When neither families nor social programs have met the basic needs of children

Four Main Types of Child Maltreatment

• Child neglect (75%)

  • Omissions in care resulting in actual or risk of significant harm

• Physical abuse (17%)

  • Commission of an act that results in actual or risk of significant injury

• Sexual abuse (8%)

  • Nonconsensual sexual acts or sexually motivated behaviors involving children, or the sexual exploitation of children

• Psychological abuse (6%): mental injury, emotional abuse

  • Repeated pattern of behavior or extreme incident that conveys to children that they are worthless, flawed, unwanted, and unloved

Stats on Child Maltreatment

• Victimization was pretty even between the sexes (boys accounting for 49% and girls accounting for 51%)

• The youngest children (those between birth and one year) had the highest rate of victimization at 24 per 1,000

• The majority of child victims were either White (43%), Black (24%), or Hispanic (21%)

• The perpetrator is likely to be a parent (except for sexual abuse); likely to be female (except for sexual abuse)

Organized Child Sexual Exploitation

• Child sex rings

  • A number of children are sexually abused by one or more perpetrators

• Child pornography/sexual abuse

  • A visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor

• Child prostitution/Youth prostitution/Commercial sexual exploitation (CSE)

  • When minors engage in sexual activities in exchange for money or favors

• Child sex trafficking and tourism

  • Sex trafficking: Buying and selling of children for adult sexual purposes

  • Sex tourism: When adults travel to foreign countries (especially developing countries) and pay to have sex with children

Witnessing Domestic Violence vs. Community Violence

• Domestic violence:

  • Often between parents

• Community violence:

  • Higher rates of violence

  • Children around the world are exposed to violent acts of terrorism and traumatic war-related events

  • Positive correlation between exposure to domestic violence and exposure to community violence

  
  
  

The Funnel vs. the Dark Figure

• The funnel:

  • Actual cases of child maltreatment → cases that come to the attention of reporters → cases reported to CPS → CPS-substantiated cases.

• Dark figure:

  • The gap between the amount of crime actually committed and the crime that is reported.

Risk Factors for Child Maltreatment

• Characteristics of the parents

  • past childhood experiences (experiencing abuse themselves)

• Characteristics of the child

  • disability, age, temperament

• Environment

  • domestic violence, poverty, violent communities

• Interaction between the abuser, the victim, and the environment

Parenting Styles

• Authoritarian parenting

  • Demanding and not responsive

• Indulgent parenting

  • Not demanding but responsive

• Neglectful parenting

  • Not demanding and not responsive

• Authoritative parenting (best style of parenting)

  • Demanding and responsive 

Categories of Discipline

• Power assertion

  • Use of physical or verbal enforcement of parental control

• Inductive techniques

  • Appeal to a child's sense of reason and fairness

• Withdrawal of love

  • Ignore, isolate, or show dislike for a child

Memory Development

• The three steps of memory

  • Encoding: the process by which information is prepared

  • Storage: retention

  • Retrieval: the process by which information is accessed

• Encoding specificity theory

  • The probability of retrieving a memory is maximized if the retrieval condition matches the encoding condition

Terms Related to Forgetting

Suppression: conscious effort

Repression: unconscious effort

Research Findings on Child Witnesses

• Children are more accurate when they participate in an event rather than merely observe it

• Children have good eyewitness identification skills: children 5 years and older are as able as adults to correctly identify the perpetrator from a perpetrator-present lineup

• Children are more likely than adults to make a false positive error from a perpetrator-absent lineup

  • Elimination lineup helps

Recommended Order of Question Type to be used with Children

• Open-ended questions

• Forced-choice questions

• Yes-no questions

• Suggestive questions

Mandated Reporters of Suspected Child Maltreatment

• Initially, only for physicians and for physical abuse

• Now for most professionals and for all forms of maltreatment

• 18 states and Puerto Rico require all citizens to report: Universal reporting laws

Culturally Based Parenting Practices

Parenting practices are often culturally determined

• Acculturation: the process of learning the culture of the host country

  • when in Rome do as the Romans do

Process of the child welfare system/dependency court