Why Are Boys More Likely to Be Referred to Juvenile Court? Gender Differences in Official and Self-Reported Delinquency

Abstract

This research aimed to investigate explanations of gender differences in referrals to juvenile court. In the Seattle Social Development Project, a prospective longitudinal survey of 808 youths, annual data on court referrals and self-reported offending were collected between ages 11 and 17. Boys were more likely than girls to be referred to juvenile court, and boys committed more offenses than girls according to self-reports. In general, the probability of a self-reported offense being followed by a court referral was similar for boys and girls, indicating that male offenders were more likely to be referred to court primarily because they committed more offenses than female offenders. The exception was that boys were more likely to be referred to court after each aggressive offense, but this gender difference disappeared after taking into account that boys were more rebellious, more likely to be gang members, and more likely to carry guns. These results suggest that gender differences in rates of court referral are unlikely to be attributable to gender biases in law enforcement or juvenile justice processing.

Keywords:

• gender differences
• juvenile court
• self-reported delinquency

Acknowledgments

The Seattle Social Development Project was funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. For assistance and helpful comments, we are very grateful to David Huizinga, Alex Piquero, and Terence P. Thornberry.

Notes

1. The annual interviews were completed in June each year. The average youth was born in March 1975, so was aged 11.3 in the 1986 assessment. Hence, the self-reports at age 11 referred to the age range 10.3–11.3. The court data were obtained for each July-June time period, and hence referred to the same age range. Annual interviews continued up to 1991 (age 16). Because of a gap in funding, the youths were not interviewed at age 17 in 1992, but they were interviewed at age 18 in 1993. For ease of exposition, the age 18 self-reports are treated as though they were age 17 self-reports. For more details, see Farrington et al. (2003).

2. In all analyses, youths were counted as missing if they were missing at the majority of ages being studied.

3. In this paper, all X² tests have 1 degree of freedom.

4. For this analysis, each person was scored according to the percentage of self-reported offenses that were followed by a court referral. Only persons with at least one self-reported offense were included. The analysis was based on persons because we wished to control for risk factors in multiple regressions. We repeated all the analyses based on offenses and the results were essentially the same. For example, 3.5% of offenses committed by boys led to a court referral, compared with 3.3% of offenses committed by girls, a nonsignificant difference; 4.2% of aggressive offenses committed by boys led to a court referral, compared with 2.7% of aggressive offenses committed by girls, a significant difference (X² = 8.88, p = .003). However, statistical tests in analyses based on offenses are problematic because the offenses are not all independent (since each person can commit many offenses). This is why we based the analyses reported in the text on persons, who are all independent.