Criminals with sons go straight
YOUNG criminals who father sons are significantly less likely to offend, an international study has revealed.
The research by UCL found young fathers of a boy on average got 25 per cent fewer convictions in the first two years after the birth compared with those who had a daughter, possibly due to their sense of responsibility as a role model.
This was then multiplied by a factor of five in the drop in crime among fellow group members in what researchers described as potential evidence that behaviour around crime is “contagious”.
The conclusions are based on the researchers’ unparalleled access to the police and court records of an entire cohort of boys who had children between the ages of 15 and 20 over a 13-year period.
Previous research has shown a link between crime and fatherless families but never before the role that parenthood and family might play in influencing criminal behaviour.
Economics professor Christian Dustmann, director of UCL’S Centre for the Research and Analysis of Migration (CREAM), said having a son could mean teenagers felt a greater responsibility to be a good role model to their child than if they had a girl.
He said the research also
had important lessons for crime prevention by graphically demonstrating the causal link between individuals’ criminal behaviour, suggesting crime was a “social phenomenon and contagious”.
“When criminal behaviour is contagious, initiatives to reduce one person’s criminal behaviour will also have a derived effect on the behaviour of others – a ‘social multiplier effect’. In consequence, the positive effects of crime prevention measures may be significantly underestimated,” he said.
“It has long been suspected that parenthood and family represents a potential route out of criminality but until now it has been difficult to demonstrate a causal connection between parenthood, family roles and criminality.”
Prof Dustmann and co-author Rasmus Landersø, of the Rockwool Foundation, analysed the social, crime, education and employment records of all males in Denmark aged 20 or below who fathered a first child from 1991 to 2004.
Men who fathered a child before 20 typically came from disadvantaged backgrounds. One in three had a conviction for crime before the child was born.
However, after the birth of their first child there was a sharp difference in criminal behaviour between those who had boys and those who fathered girls – and it continued for at least five years after the birth when the records stopped. “Perhaps they now see themselves as a role model and this feeling is stronger when the child is a boy,” said the researchers, who cited previous studies of fathers’ gender bias, including evidence of fathers being more likely to hand a company to their firstborn if it was a boy and voting patterns of members of US congress depending on the gender of their own children.
The study, which was funded and published by the Rockwool Foundation, then tracked the crime conviction rates in “girl-child” and “boy-child”
‘It has long been suspected that parenthood and family represents a potential route out of criminality’
neighbourhoods, which were the same before the babies’ births, but then noticeably dropped in “boy-child” neighbourhoods after the births.
Victims’ experience of crime also fell sharply in “boy-child” areas.
The researchers say: “We establish[ed] a multiplier close to five, which means that a reduction in a young father’s crime by one will in the following years result in a total of five fewer crime convictions for him and his peers.
“These finds suggest that the benefits from programmes that reduce crime at an early stage of a young person’s life are far larger than suggested by the primary effects alone.”