Font Sarah A, Kennedy Reeve
Pennsylvania State University, Department of Sociology and Criminology, 612 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802.
Pennsylvania State University, Department of Sociology and Criminology.
Annu Rev Criminol. 2022 Jan;5:371-396. doi: 10.1146/annurev-criminol-030920-120220. Epub 2021 Aug 2.
Despite sufficient evidence to conclude that maltreatment exposure affects the risk of crime and delinquency, we conclude that the unique effects of child maltreatment on crime and delinquency, and the mechanisms through which those effects operate, remain poorly identified. Key challenges include insufficient attention to the overlap of child maltreatment with various forms of family dysfunction and adversity and a lack of comprehensive measurement of the multiple, often comorbid, forms of child maltreatment. We then consider potential impacts of the child welfare system on the maltreatment-crime link. Because the child welfare system typically provides voluntary, short-term services of unknown quality, it likely neither increases nor reduces risks of delinquency and crime for most children who encounter it. For the comparatively small subset of children experiencing foster care, impacts on delinquency and crime likely vary by the quality of environments within and after their time in care - issues that, to date, have received too little attention.
尽管有充分证据表明遭受虐待会影响犯罪和违法的风险，但我们得出的结论是，儿童虐待对犯罪和违法的独特影响以及这些影响产生作用的机制仍未得到充分确认。关键挑战包括对儿童虐待与各种形式的家庭功能失调和逆境之间重叠情况的关注不足，以及对多种往往并存的儿童虐待形式缺乏全面衡量。然后，我们考虑儿童福利系统对虐待与犯罪之间联系的潜在影响。由于儿童福利系统通常提供质量不明的自愿短期服务，对于大多数接触该系统的儿童来说，它可能既不会增加也不会降低其违法和犯罪的风险。对于相对少数经历寄养的儿童来说，对其违法和犯罪的影响可能因寄养期间及之后所处环境的质量而异——而这些问题迄今为止受到的关注太少。
