Female Juvenile Delinquents - Term Paper Example

The essence of this paper is to investigate the status quo of the girl child delinquent and to evaluate the effectiveness of the various mitigation measures that have been put forward. Statistics have proved that there is disproportionate growth of the female juvenile crime rate as compared to that of the opposite gender. According to FBI report (2011), female-child arrests increased by 4% between the year 1999 and 2003 in the U.S. Between 2007 and 2008, the female child arrests for minor crimes increased by about 12% while the rate of male juvenile increased only by 2%.

The data from FBI statistics point to an alarming growth of the female crime rate, while the effort to control male juvenile seems to be yielding a good reap. In addition, the statistics analysts have predicted that going by the projection of this crime scenario, female juvenile would get out of control by the year 2014. Resultantly, there is a need for quick and effective intervention procedures contain female delinquency before it is out hands. Research has associated the offending behavior of the girl child to a lot early age victimization of this gender.

Physical, sexual and emotional harassment predisposes young girls to the risk of engaging in future offending actions. Scholars have identified a causal relationship between female juveniles and a history of victimization during their early age of growth. According to Acoca (2000, p. 48), most of the females offendants who have been arrested have a history of some form of harassment. These scholars believe that female children resort to crime as a way of settling their emotional distress that is hard to cope.

Moreover, the female child is more prone to victimization than the male child, which explains why there is a disproportionate growth in crime rate among female child. Various forms of victimization have been manifested among the sample cases that have been used for research. Rape, violent beating, stabbing and clack of parental care were among the cases that affected many girls at the age of 13 and 14 years. The FBI (2011) blamed increase in child victimization for the rise in female child defendants.

According to psychologists, victims of violence manifest symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which if not properly managed can permanently impair the social behavior of the girl child. Most psychologists have drawn an analogy of female delinquency to the condition of battered woman syndrome that is manifested among married women (Paludi, 2011). The similarity between the two is that both are runaways for victims of some form of violence. The Detroit Police Department reported that females who suffered rape either from strangers or from members of their family had a higher risk of engaging in crime.

Another trigger for female delinquency is the lack of or poor parenting. Children who have their parents dead either through murder or any other reason ended up indulging in crime. Most orphaned females end up dropping out of school, risk getting pregnant at adolescence and in some instances end up in drug abuse. Eventually, they end up being enrolled in criminal groups as the only consolation for their stressful life. There is more to worry about since these female delinquents end up being the women criminals in the society (Siegel & Welsh, 2008).