Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health最新文献

I have spent a significant part of my career with a team of talented young researchers investigating how childhood bullying impacts people's mental health and overall functioning. Together over the years, we have demonstrated that the impact of childhood bullying victimisation is environmentally mediated (Arseneault et al. 2008), that children who experience bullying benefit from supportive family environments (Bowes et al. 2010) and that bullying contributes to early psychotic symptoms (Arseneault et al. 2011). We also explored the biological effects of bullying victimisation, including HPA axis dysregulation (Ouellet-Morin et al. 2011) and inflammation (Danese et al. 2011). Our findings highlight the long-term impact of being bullied in childhood on both mental and physical health in adulthood (Takizawa et al. 2014) and document the burden bullying places on the NHS and UK mental health services (Evans-Lacko et al. 2017).

Whenever I presented these findings at conferences or scientific meetings, without fail someone in the audience would ask, ‘What about the children who bully others?’ My initial thought was always the same: these are children with conduct problems, and decades of research have already produced extensive knowledge about them. What more remains to be uncovered? Eventually, I decided to investigate whether children who bully others were simply children with conduct problems or if there was more to their behaviour. In doing so, I followed in the footsteps of David Farrington, who has long studied bullying behaviours and their developmental impact.

David Farrington extensively examined bullying from a criminological perspective, investigating the long-term trajectory of children who bully others. In doing so, he drew insights from his own Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential (ICAP) theory, in which he aimed to explain criminal behaviour by distinguishing antisocial potential (AP) and cognition (Farrington 2020). His theory stipulates that individuals with high long-term antisocial potential are more likely to engage in persistent offending, whereas those with low long-term antisocial potential may only commit crimes in certain situations. It integrates psychological and social influences to demonstrate why some people offend more frequently or persistently than others. From this view, Farrington hypothesised that both bullying and violent offending are symptoms of the same underlying issues, suggesting that the later outcomes of children who bully would be similar to those involved in violent offences. His analyses invariably used data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a prospective longitudinal cohort study of 411 men from South London, first assessed in the early 1960s. He led that study for several years, following on from his colleague, British psychiatrist Donald J. West.

With Mari

Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a set of symptoms and signs that may follow from exposure of the unborn child to alcohol during pregnancy. Characterised by cognitive and behavioural impairments, one secondary outcome from FASD, is encounters with the criminal justice system (CJS). In some countries, for example, England and Wales, it seems likely that many cases are missed at this point and, thus, courts are at risk of making unsafe judgements. We could learn a lot from countries where services are generally more used to dealing with FASD. Australia is one such country.

It is unlikely that David Farrington ever saw what I name in this commentary as the ‘Farrington Curve’, which plots the combined seriousness and frequency of reported offending among the most harmful suspects in any population. It is also unlikely that he ever knew just how extreme the difference can be in cumulative harm between median offenders and the most extreme outliers. Even so, without Farrington's years of pondering and publishing on such issues, I doubt that Sir Mark Rowley, a Cambridge mathematics graduate and current Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, would have even asked a vitally important question as he took office in 2022: Who are the hundred most dangerous people in London?

Fortunately, the work of David Farrington had already spread widely in British criminology and policing, at least among the discerning. That work, based on the 411 males from southeast London who David studied for much of his life (and theirs), revealed important differences among people who were either self-reported criminals, convicted offenders or both. These differences went far beyond the orthodox UK Civil Service perspective on repeat offending as an either/or category, with nil regard to the difference between a bicycle theft and a murder or between one bike theft and two hundred.

As late as 2007, the UK Home Office told me that the only officially acceptable test of whether a justice innovation worked was the percentage of convicted offenders who were convicted a second time within a fixed time period (usually 2 years). Even while the Home Office economists had been developing a cost-of-crime weighting for common offences based on governmental expenditures per crime for each crime type (Brand and Price 2000), the policy officials would not accept a cost-of-crime reduction as a measure of reduced severity and frequency of crime. In response to my challenge, I was invited by the Home Office policy team to argue the point with a Home Office statistician, but the statistician agreed with me—and with David Farrington who had already written on the issue. Therefore, using the Home Office economists' estimates of cost-of-crime tariffs by offence category, the estimates by Shapland et al. (2008) were able to show that police-led restorative justice conferences lowered repeat offending costs of crime substantially in three of our randomised controlled trials (L. W. Sherman et al. 2015).

The foundation for the Home Office economists' work had been laid decades ago by David Farrington. His 1987 Crime and Justice article showed how large the variance in the frequency of crime was across his 411 cases (Farrington 1987). That article also identified the need for criminology to create an index to show how dangerous the mix of any one person's offending was in relation to the relative seriousness of the variety of offence types. In a 1985 discussion of differences in