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35 Crime & Delinquency 3 (1989)

handle is hein.journals/cadq35 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction Jill Leslie Rosenbaum Traditionally, the study of delinquency has essentially tried to explain lower class male delinquency. Although there has been increased attention paid to the criminality of women in the last decade, much of this literature attempts to explain the nature and extent of female offending and/ or apply theoretical formulations developed to explain lower class male delinquency to women. Since women are involved in less criminal behavior than men and much of that behavior is of a less serious nature, it is thought to be less consequential and, thus, less worthy of attention. As a result, our understanding of female crime is still in its infancy. This lack of information is not only apparent in the academic literature, but has a profound effect in the treatment of female offenders in the courts and prisons. The role of the family in the development of delinquency has received considerable attention. Again, the majority of this work has focused on the effect of the family on male delinquency. This issue examines female offending and the criminal justice system's response to women, with particular emphasis on various aspects of the role of the family. The first article, by Meda Chesney-Lind, reviews the major theories of delinquency with particular attention paid to the androcentric bias inherent to them and explores the need for a feminist theory of delinquency. In so doing, she discusses the role that the juvenile justice system has played in the sexualization of female delinquency and the criminalization of girls' survival strategies. In the second article, I examine the family backgrounds of a group of girls who were committed to the California Youth Authority in the early 1960s. Most of these young women began their criminal careers as runaways. More often than not, they were running away from extremely dysfunctional and abusive homes and found their attempts to escape criminalized by the juvenile justice system. The next two articles deal with specific family factors that have been found to have a relationship on delinquent behavior. In the first of these articles Merry Morash and Lila Rucker examine the effect of mother's age at the birth of her first child on the future delinquency of her children. In their examination of four data sets (the London Longi- tudinal Survey, the Philadelphia Cohort Data, the National Longitu- 3 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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