Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T07:40:35.803Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Childhood Bereavement and Subsequent Crime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Felix Brown
Affiliation:
Royal Free Hospital, London, W.C.1
Phyllis Epps
Affiliation:
Dormer End, Lynchmere, Nr. Haslemere, Surrey. Holloway Prison, London

Extract

It has long been recognized that deprivation in childhood could be related to subsequent crime. Bunyan, in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, takes for granted that orphanhood renders a girl liable to early seduction. Dickens, writing of Newgate Prison in his Sketches by Boz, says: “Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one of those children, born and bred in neglect and vice, who had never known what childhood is; who have never been taught to love and court a parent's smile, or to dread a parent's frown. The thousand nameless endearments of childhood, its gaiety and its innocence, are alike unknown to them. They have entered at once into the stern realities and miseries of life, and to their better nature it is almost impossible to appeal in after times ….” In 1944, Bowlby outlined the concept of the affectless and affectionless psychopath produced by deprivation and repeated change of parent figure. The Gluecks, in 1950, found an increase of incidence of broken family in young male delinquents. Analysis of their figures (Fig. 1) suggests that loss of mothers in the childhood of these male delinquents was significant. In 1961 we made an examination of 200 women prisoners and concluded that loss of fathers in childhood was a significant factor in female delinquents.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1966 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Banks, C. (1963). Interim Report on Research with Young Offenders. R.M.P.A. Circulation, July, 1963. p. 14.Google Scholar
Bowlby, J. (1946). Forty-four Juvenile Thieves. London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox.Google Scholar
Brown, F. (1961). “Depression and childhood bereavement.” J. Ment. Sci. 107, 754.Google Scholar
Brown, F. (1966). “Childhood bereavement and subsequent psychiatric disorder.” Brit. J. Psychiat. 112, 1035.Google Scholar
Brown, F., Epps, P., and McGlashan, A. (1961). “Remote and immediate effects of orphanhood.” Proc. 3rd World Congress of Psychiatry, 1316.Google Scholar
Bunyan, John (1680). Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles (1835). Sketches by Boz, Ch. 25, “A Visit to Newgate”.Google Scholar
Glueck, S. and Glueck, E. T. (1950). Unravelling Juvenile Delinquency, p. 90. Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Little, A. (1965). “Parental deprivation, separation and crime.” Brit. J. Criminol., 5, 419.Google Scholar
Orphanhood, , Fertility and Dependency Supplement, 1921 Census, 231. H.M.S.O. Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.