Juvenile delinquency

Junenile delinquency is lawbreaking by non-adult persons. It includes such crimes as murder, robbery as well as offences, such as truancy or sexual acts. The term "juvenile" most commonly refers to some under 18 years of age. Delinquency is a major social problem. Delinquency is likely to come from a background of poverty, from broken homes, from the families of drinkers and drug addicts. Criminologists who study juvenile delinquency attempt to explain it in several ways:

1) One theory is that delinquency is learned behavior, acquired by associating with people who have little respect

for the law

2) Anotherexplanation is that juveniles who are caught and labelled delinquent by the authorities are likely to continue to break the lawbecause that label makes it harder for them to be law obeying.

3) Other explanations stress biological or psychological causes.

Have you ever asked yourself why the problem of juvenile delinquency became so widely discussed nowadays? We have never seen such boom of crimes committed by juveniles before or may be we were not allowed to see them or simply closed our eyes at them. We used to say that we had neither drugs addiction nor prostitution. It seems that these problems as well as alcohol abuse appeared from nowhere. But they are no longer in their arising stage. They are progressing with all their strengthand this is because all these problems were hidden from people. This is because we lost our time, we failed to make some actions when it was possible.

Now we look around and we are terrified at the sight of consequences. The percent of crimes committed by juveniles rises with every year. The list of crimes starts with petty offences, goes through housebreaking, shoplifting, mugging to be topped by murder. People are terrorized by mobsters and thugs, many of them are quite problem teenagers, including those who run away from their homes. Only few people realize that the words “drug addicts”, “neglected children”, “glue snuffers” can be said not about other boys and girls but sometimes about their own childre. But why do teenagers run away from homes, from their loving mother and fathers? And why do they choose to look and act aggressive and tough? If they want to express themselves in such a way - its their own business, but why at other people's expense? It is no longer safe to walk in the street at night because you may be hit and robbed by young gangs who disturb and horrify people by their actions. Sometimes they hurt people just for pleasure, sometimes they need money so they decide to take them form others by robbing.

One more factor of worsening the situation is that people prefer to stay away from everything until it touches them.They simply watch and wait to see the results. As I have already said the juvenile problem is the result of the policy of silence which disguised many of our problems including this one. To wind everything up I should say if people were not so indifferent this problem would not become so essential.