Comments on: Debate debate on single mothers and crime

By: e

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:37:29 +0000

The gender-neutral perspective:
empirical evidence is that non-viable pairing causes single-parenthood. This reality nullifies the PC “chose not to marry” propaganda.

By: e

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:29:19 +0000

Yes, compare major factors amongst countries.
Incarceration
Social inequality & underclasses
Some measure of ptsd/child-soldier type ‘derangement’ (relatively high population of Vietnam war drafteee vets vs smaller proportion of combat vets from Iraq and Afghanistan)
Age “bulges” (young male boomers vs violence, 1960′s through 1980′s)

I suspect younger average/median age explains much of S and Cent American nations’ violence rates. I also expect significant differences between the brutal civil war legacy countries ?(Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras… Chile?) to the more democratic legacy countries (Costa Rica… and? Peru? iirc reading of Peruvian corruption…)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country
(data source http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/crime/Homicide_statistics2012.xls)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#United_States

Related complications that occlude data are:
Large, uncohesive nations.
Small nations with busy cross-border circulation.

By: Rourke75

Rourke75 — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:47:44 +0000

I think you are missing another (major) causative factor of single-parent families: negative societal reinforcement of stable family structure by the political left which benefits from the instability this brings to people’s lives by creating/maintaining a “market” for services and entitlements – a market whose customers continue to vote for candidates who give them stuff. Just look (for example) at the response liberals give when you talk about anything regarding supporting traditional families, or abstinence education, or marriage as the most desirable and healthy precursor to sex and children. They fly into fits of rage! Nowhere is this more true, and nowhere are traditional values leading to stable families more threatening to liberal politics, than among middle to lower income people. No, liberal politicians for decades have been playing the game of pretending to be “for” the little folks, all the while quietly working to keep their lives in shambles so that they will not be able to climb out of utter dependence on government programs.

By: The Real, Complex Connection Between Single-Parent Families and Crime « spearide

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 23:14:59 +0000

[...] academics and advocates, including Cohen here, counter that mass incarceration is actually creating more single-parent families. That argument [...]

By: Single Moms Can’t Be Scapegoated for the Murder Rate Anymore « Family Inequality

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:43:39 +0000

[...] I’ve written before about the assumption that the rise in single-parent families was responsible for the violent crime bonanza of the 1980s and 1990s. (Romney and Ryan returned to this theme.) [...]

By: GracefulSwallow

GracefulSwallow — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:47:40 +0000

Wow. The mothers have no part in the cause of separation between the parents? Women are never cruel, abusive, demanding, vindictive? All men are the abusers, dumbasses, assholes? All women are hoodwinked from the onset? The father is always the problem . . .

By: This Week in Poverty: Bigfoot, Nessie and Paul Ryan | News & Notes, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 15:26:41 +0000

[...] “Debate debate on single mothers and crime,” Phillip Cohen [...]

By: Callie Burt

Callie Burt — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 05:25:45 +0000

Excellent diagram!! While not your focus, you could also add a link/arrow from racism to crime, based on number of quality studies conducted over the past decade. (And, admittedly a central focus of my own work).
(See, Unnever & Gabbidon 2011-A Theory of African American Offending or Simons et al. 2003 in Justice Quarterly).

By: Ron Henzel

Ron Henzel — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:06:31 +0000

Perhaps this is not considered relevant, but in the Bible, the first murderer was raised in an intact, two-parent family. While there may be contemporary exceptions, I do not believe that the authentic Judeo-Christian tradition has sought to legitimize marriage and the traditional family on the basis of any supposed power on its part to ameliorate societal problems. Such arguments are, I believe, distinctly modern ones.

By: Alara Rogers

Alara Rogers — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 19:22:16 +0000

The thing about the finding about two-parent stable homes being better for kids is that it tends to be spun by the conservatives as if the problem is all these selfish women just choosing not to marry the man they had kids with.

What seems likely to me is that a large number of the single mothers are either struggling to keep their child out of the hands of a rapist or abuser, dealing with emotional problems because they were abandoned by the guy they loved, dealing with emotional problems because they are constantly being abandoned by guys they loved, dealing with emotional problems because the guy they loved was such an asshole that they had to divorce him for their own sanity, struggling to make do because the man who would otherwise have helped them has been thrown in jail, or other factors which basically boil down to the father of the child spectacularly failing the mother and child in some way. Of course, if you’re being raised by a single parent who expected to be in a two parent unit and isn’t, or who was traumatized by the other parent, your life is going to be more unstable than a person who was raised in a single parent household where the single parent expected and accounted for being a single parent.

In other words, the outcomes for children of women who decided “men suck, I’m gonna raise a kid with the help of my mom and sisters” would be much better than the outcomes for children of women who thought “You love me! I love you! We’ll get married and have babies!” and then found that the man they’d married was an evil abusive fucker, or who lost that man to incarceration or his death (unexpected death is much more common in young men than young women because of the role of violence and car accidents). But we can’t separate those populations with a mere statistic on “single mom vs married mom”; we can, however, assume that cultural pressure to get married before you have kids ensures that *more* single moms are unexpectedly in that situation than who planned for single motherhood.

So if we want to argue that being a single mother produces worse outcomes for children, what we really need to argue is that paternal abandonment, cruelty, and incompetence is what produces the bad outcome for the children. A woman has no control over whether she is single or not if it’s the man who left her, and she has no control over whether he is an abuser or not, or a total asshole she can’t bear to live with or not, and most especially these things are true if she was under considerable social pressure to marry the guy before living with him first, as she’s a lot less likely to know how he’ll act under pressure if she didn’t live with him for some time before marriage and children. It’s the men who decide to leave their kids, the men who decide to commit crimes, the men who decide to be cruel and abusive, the men who make dumbass mistakes and get killed behind the wheel of a car. We need to stop talking about the problem being single mothers, when the problem is failed fathers.