Adolescent Crisis and Delinquency

Abstract

My crisis theory was publicly proposed in 1980 to explain why even the youths who do not have any serious home problems and/or personality disorders do evil deeds, and why delinquency tends to occur in adolescence.

I use, for this purpose, three kinds of facters(basic crises, personal or situational crises and life cycle crises). Delinquency or crime is considered as one of the reactions a person takes against these sometimes conbined crises.

Adolescents have a developmental task“becoming an adult”, which consists of four sub-tasks; establishment of sex-role, parental separation, joining the members and orientaring of the way of life. Young adolescents are very anxious of becoming adults, for they have hardly any experience as adults. This consists of the adolescenct crisis.

Normal, less deprivated adoloescents challenge the task by three kinds of ways; taking in advance adult, rejecting maturity and these midway.

Delinquency may generate from any way, but most from the taking in advance adult way. They use delinquency as an instrument or initiation rites for becoming adults. They make experimentation and demonstration of full-grown person, or pararize their consciousness of life target diffusion through delinquency.

The adolescents who have so far been well adjusted do misdeeds mostly during a period of fourteen to seventeen years old, but they soon overcome such childish deeds, and thereafter become well-adjusted men.