The majority of studies and essays on delinquency are greatly concerned with family stability. The presence of both parents, preferably the genetic parents, in the home is felt to be a matter of prime importance in the development of the children. The parents serve not only as sources of affection, nurture, and needed authority, but also as models from which the child develops more general ideas about the two sexes and their roles in life.

Consequently one of our concerns, and one frequently related to interparental adjustment, is the question whether or not the interviewee grew to adulthood (the beginning of which we have arbitrarily set as age eighteen for males) in a home with his natural parents: i.e., did he or did he not come from a broken home? We considered that any of the following events broke the home:

Separation or divorce of the natural parents.

Death of one or both of the natural parents.

Adoption of the interviewee by persons other than his natural parents.

Illegitimacy, or the lack of a socially recognized parent. (Note that common-law marriage offspring were not considered illegitimate.)

Forced removal of the interviewee to an institution for juvenile offenders for a lengthy period. Insofar as the interviewee is concerned, this is the functional equivalent to an ordinary breakup of the home.

The vast majority of cases of broken homes involved separation, divorce, or death. If a boy voluntarily left home, became self-sufficient, and did not return, he was not considered as coming from a broken home. While not so common as formerly, it is still not rare for a boy between fifteen and seventeen years old to leave home and support himself.

Fewest of the control-group males came from broken homes: about 30 per cent, contrasting with the; 50 or more per cent of most sex-offender groups and the 54 per cent of the prison group4 (see Figure 1). Aside from this, the figures provide no clear-cut information upon which generalizations can be based. Such factors as the age and sex of the person against whom the offense was committed, and the voluntary nature of the sexual relationship, all of which correlated with interparental adjustment, do not appear to correlate with broken homes.

The age of the average (median) individual at the time the original home was broken seems related to the type of sex offense in only a general way. For the majority of groups, including the control and prison group, the breakup occurred between ages six and eight. The youngest median age was reported by the homosexual offenders vs. adults, and the oldest, by the incest offenders vs. minors. The sex offenders whose offenses were against postpubertal females tend to have been older (a median age of seven or older) when their homes broke up; the homosexual offenders and offenders against prepubertal girls were younger (under seven) when their homes were disrupted.5

We analyzed in some detail the living arrangements made for the boys after their homes broke up. From this only a few salient findings emerged. First of all, it became evident that for some boys the new arrangement remained unchanged until he matured and left to take up independent residence, while other boys were shifted about from relatives to institutions and back again, accumulating a history of numerous arrangements. At the low extreme were the incest offenders vs. adults who came from broken homes: the average was only 1.3 arrangements as sequelae of the breakup of their original parental homes. At the other extreme were the aggressors vs. minors, whose equivalent figure was almost one and one-half times larger, 1.9. Midway between them came the control and prison groups. No general trends or clusterings were noted.

Where the boy went following the breakup of the home was another matter investigated. We found that from a fourth to a third of the aggressors had been sent to institutions (second-, third-, and fourth-largest proportions recorded). The prison group ranked fifth and the control group ranked next to lowest. Aside from this the only other general finding was that relatively few of the incest offenders were sent to institutions or to foster homes, the great majority remaining with a parent. One fifth of the members of the control group had been in foster homes, and slightly more of the prison group.6

When one inspects the data on the age at which the interviewee left the parental home voluntarily and became independent, it is obvious that the percentages involved depend heavily upon the age composition of the groups compared and the proportion who married. An appreciable proportion of the younger groups, naturally, still considered the parent’s home as theirs, while fewer or no individuals in the older groups did. This generalization appears to be contradicted by the fact that in the relatively young prison group 23 per cent had never given up their parental residence, whereas for the older control group the figure was 29 per cent. This is a case where the effect of imprisonment (usually repeated) has outweighed the age factor, for a person who has been out of his parents’ home for a substantial length of time is less likely to return. Also, more of the prison group were married than of the control group; the difference is particularly marked in the teens and early twenties. This alone could account for the fact that, despite their greater age, more of the control-group males lived in their parental homes.

Fewer of the sex offenders stayed at home. However, the variation is great, ranging from 39 per cent for the heterosexual aggressors vs. minors (who are the youngest group) to zero for the incest offenders, who are an old group and, by definition, all married.

The median prison-group male left his parents’ home at about seventeen, and most of the median sex offenders left somewhat later, when they were eighteen to nineteen. The control-group male left last of all, when he was twenty-one, the comparative stability of his home and the fact that his residence there was not interrupted by penal servitude explaining why he was inclined to stay with his parents longer. In addition, as we have seen, he got along better with his parents than did the sex offenders or prison males, and this would encourage tarrying. The economic factor is difficult to judge. In some cases poverty might force a young man from the home so that he would not be a financial burden; in other cases it might serve to make him remain in the home to contribute to the family’s support.

Psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and society in general hold the strong opinion that it is highly desirable for a child to be reared in a family where both parents are present. We have already treated the matter of broken homes, but we felt additional analysis was merited. Consequently we tabulated the number of years each man had spent, before his nineteenth birthday, in a home where the husband and wife were present. They may have been either his own or surrogate parents; the major point is that a husband and wife were present to fulfill the ordinary parental functions.

As one would anticipate, the control group comes Out best, with 80 per cent of them having lived 15 or more years in a home in which there were both a husband and wife. The figure for most sex-offender groups is 58 to 68 per cent, and for the prison group 61 per cent. In the six highest groups (all with percentages above 65 per cent) there are no aggressors or offenders against children under twelve. The length of time a boy lived in a home with a husband and wife present seems to correlate positively with voluntary sexual activity with older partners. This is even more clearly seen ~ Aen one constructs a rank-order on the basis of 18 or more years spent in a home with two parents. Here the upper five positions are occupied by groups whose sexual objects were adult (age sixteen and over) and in which no force was used. The aggressors, those using force, occupy the lower part of the scale.

It was thought worthwhile also to study the effects of being reared in an all-female household, a home in which there was no father or father-surrogate. However, a tabulation of the number of years spent in an all-female household revealed nothing of evident significance.

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