Gender differences in antisocial behaviour

Female and male juvenile offenders share many risk factors, including poor academic histories, living in high-crime neighborhoods, family dysfunction, and poverty. However, female juvenile offenders are more likely than male juvenile offenders to have experienced physical or sexual abuse. For girls, having at least one parent with a criminal record greatly increases the likelihood that they will be arrested by age 15.

While the overall juvenile female arrest rate exceeds the rate for juvenile males, young females are less likely than boys to possess the risk factors associated with the life-course-persistent trajectory of antisocial behavior. For example, female children exhibit fewer developmental motor delays, temperamental difficulties, and neuropsychological and cognitive problems, including learning and reading difficulties. As predicted, fewer females than males were classified as life-course-persistent, but their backgrounds were similar in that they shared several of the life-course-persistent risk factors. However, adolescence-onset antisocial girls are expected to be more numerous than their life-course-persistent counterparts because they are exposed to the same antisocial peers as are adolescent boys. Yet the opportunities to engage in antisocial behavior may be more limited for adolescent girls than for adolescent boys because girls are more likely to experience physical harm (e.g., sexual assault), which may reduce their involvement in delinquent behaviors.