Child Delinquent Care s Nursing Challenge
What Is Child Delinquents
Child delinquents (juveniles between the ages of 7 and 12) constitute a population not usually recognized as needing services to prevent them from becoming tomorrow's serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders. The most violent behaviors demonstrated by delinquent youth are homicide and sex offenses.
Although the number of cases involving offenses included in the FBI's Violent Crime Index (criminal homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) decreased by 8% between 1997 and 1998 (FBI, 1999), for children under the age of 12, child arrests for violent crimes increased by 45%. Overall, child delinquents arrested in 1997 were more likely to be charged with a violent crime, a weapons offense, or a drug law violation than a property offense (Snyder, 2001).
A larger proportion of these young child delinquents, as compared with
later onset delinquents, become serious, violent, and chronic offenders
(Lieber, Farrington, & Pete Chuk, 2003).
Specific Dealing With Violent Acts
To treat youth who have committed some violent act, an understanding of violence in the lives of children is necessary. Violent behavior has specific risk factors and more common forms of violence that vary by gender, age and race/ethnicity.
Risk factors for violence include 2 or more hours of media
violence daily, history of physical fighting, harsh spanking as a form of
discipline, carrying weapons, exposure to domestic violence, history of
suicidal attempts, bullying, fear of attack at school, crime victimization,
maltreatment, and sexual abuse (Brown & Bzostek , 2003).
Violence At Home
For infants and young children, the primary locus of violence is in the home. Health consequences of abuse include permanent brain damage from shaken baby syndrome and homicide. The perpetrators are almost always a parent or other relative. The homicide rate for infants is higher than for any age group up to age 17 ( Gells , 2002).
Surviving toddlers exposed to domestic violence experience depression and psychological distress and are more likely than other children to be physically violent ( Gells , 2003). Media violence and violence in the schools, which includes bullying and physical fighting, are more common sources of violence in middle childhood.
Data indicate that chances of being
bullied in school are higher for 6th graders than for any other group up to
grade 12 (De Viète al., 2002). For teens, homicide and suicide increase rapidly
and the risk of being a victim of sexual assault, aggravated assault, and
robbery also increases (Menino, Arias, Kochanski, Murphy, & Smith, 2002).
Violence Experience And Ethnicity
Differences in violence experiences by race and ethnicity and by type of violence abo exist. These factors reflect social factors related to family structure, income, education level, and neighborhood characteristics. Black infants are four times as likely to be murdered than Hispanic or white infants (Overpeck, Brenner, Trumble , Triflate, & Berendes, 1998).
Black teens are twice as
likely to be murdered as Hispanic teens and about 12 times as likely to be
murdered as white teens (Anderson, 2002). Black youth are more likely to have
been abused (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2003a) and more likely
to report being victims of aggravated assault and robbery than their Hispanic
or white counterparts (Hawkins et al., 2000).
Violence Types And Experiences
As might be expected, there are variations in the types of violence experienced by males and females. Females at any age are more likely to be victims of sexual abuse and rape (Finkel or & Hashim, 2001).
Males under the age of 8 are more likely to be victims of physical abuse in the home, a trend that changes to female teens between ages 12 to 17. Both male and female students are equally likely to report dating violence, but females are more likely to suffer significant injury from such violence (Hawkins et al., 2000).
A public health strategy used for public health risks should be applied to preventing serious and violent juvenile delinquency, with a focus on targeting early risk factors associated with persistent disruptive child behavior.
Because it is not possible to accurately predict which children will progress from serious problem behaviors to delinquency ( Locher , Farrington, & Petechuk , 2003), it is better to address problem behaviors before they come more serious.
Interventions delivered early are most effective to prevent child delinquency,
whether these interventions focus on the individual child, the home and family,
or the school and community.
The most promising prevention programs for child delinquency focus on several risk domains at a time (Herren Kohl, Hawkins, Chung, Hill, & Batten-Pearson, 2001) in an effort to shift the balance toward a greater number of protective domains.
To achieve this effect, multisystemic programs designed to target the
child, family, school, peers, and the community have proven most effective. These
include parent training and family therapy in combination with classroom and
behavior management programs.
Effective Treatment of Families
The first step towards obtaining effective treatment is to provide families with access to mental health and other services. The delay between symptom onset and help seeking contributes to poor behavioral health outcomes.
Awareness and use of culturally congruent approaches reduce the challenges to implementing interventions. Interventions must deal with the multiple problems stemming from generations of dysfunctional families.
To be effective, these public health interventions must address both the social conditions and institutions that impact family functioning. While the very early detection of emotional and behavioral problems is a public health goal, results have been limited.
Juvenile justice systems continue to be dumping grounds for children who are
inadequately served by other institutions (Kuerten, 1971; Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1995).
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