Introduction

This is the first of three chapters which examine the importance of social influences and experiences for the explanation of criminal behavior. It focuses on childhood and adolescence, and proceeds from an account of research on moral development, through parental child-training and the importance of family experiences for early and subsequent offending, before moving outside the family to schools, peer groups and the impact of the media, particularly television, on children and adolescents. The overall emphasis in research on childhood and crime has been on failures to acquire socially acceptable behaviors and on the reasons for failure, which are seen to lie in dysfunctional families, specifically in inadequate parenting, both in itself and in interaction with influences outside the home, and with individual differences between children.

Moral development

There are two major descriptive systems of moral development, those of Piaget, and of Kohlberg. The former is more of historical importance; the latter provides the major focus for current research on moral development. Both are rather sparse on the detail of the socialization process, emphasizing instead that, providing the right broad conditions are available, moral development will occur almost inevitably. Also, both systems explicitly assume the unfolding of a sequence of changes which are roughly correlated with age as the individual matures, changes which are largely independent of specific learning experiences but arise from the inherent structure of human cognitive functioning.