Abstract
That parental offending acts as a strong risk factor for offending in children is well-established within criminology. Yet, research on maternal offending is relatively limited, even though many women take on a significantly higher share of childcare responsibilities, and as such, might reasonably be expected to exert an especially strong influence on their children. In part, this lacuna might be attributed to a male-centric lens within criminology, which has tended to overlook female offending. Aimed in part at redressing this imbalance, this article investigates the maternal transmission of offending among a cohort of 12-year-olds, using self-report data from the longitudinal Growing Up in Scotland study. The analysis shows that intragenerational maternal offending acts as a significant predictor of offending among daughters, but that intergenerational offending does not. We found no significant relationship between mothers’ offending and sons’, who appear more vulnerable to a range of wider risk factors.
Highlights
That parental offending acts as a strong risk factor for offending among children is wellestablished within criminology, with research dating back to at least the 1950s (Glueck and Glueck, 1950)
This article aims to explore whether maternal offending influences the risk of offending among a contemporaneous cohort of children at age 12, distinguishing between intergenerational offending and intragenerational offending
We found strong evidence to support the transmission of offending between mothers and children, but only when maternal offending occured after the child was born and only in the case of daughters
Summary
That parental offending acts as a strong risk factor for offending among children is wellestablished within criminology, with research dating back to at least the 1950s (Glueck and Glueck, 1950). Auty et al (2017) provide one of the most detailed studies of sex-specific mechanisms in intergenerational offending and conclude that maternal offending has different causal mechanisms for male and female offspring They propose that assortative mating is most likely to explain the mother’s influence; whereas, for daughters, they draw on social learning and interactional theory to suggest that ‘the transmission of criminal behaviour from mothers was explained by harsh discipline, which may involve a modelling process between mother and daughter’ (Auty et al 2017: 231). Given the common status of mothers as the primary or (in the case of parental separation) sole carer for children, it is not unreasonable to suppose that intragenerational offending may have a greater impact on such modelling processes (especially compared to that of fathers in the 1960s) This would be consistent with a growing body of feminist research on the experiences of women who offend and the negative influence of mothers’ justice system contact, especially imprisonment, on children There are clearly many other factors which might impact on offending in childhood; in the context of understanding the impact of maternal offending, it seems pertinent to focus on those that might be related, either directly or indirectly, to the role of the mother as primary caregiver
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