Girls play truant more than boys

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New research published by the University of Edinburgh reveals that there is a substantial difference in levels of serious delinquency between boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 15. Four new reports examine truancy, parenting, gender and victimization among young people and look at the links to delinquent and criminal behaviour. There was little difference in delinquency between girls and boys if trivial as well as serious incidents were included, but the difference in serious delinquency was substantial. Girls were involved in certain specific forms of delinquency--theft from home, writing graffiti, and truancy--more often than boys. However, specific forms of more serious delinquency--carrying a weapon, housebreaking, robbery, theft from cars, and cruelty to animals--were much more common among boys than girls. The reports also found parents play a crucial role in determining the pattern of their children's behaviour as they become teenagers. The ratio between boys and girls in terms of the average number of offences committed was lowest at age 14, and then began to increase again. The difference was much greater for serious offending than for all offending. 40 per cent of girls at age 13 reported writing or spraying graffiti on property in the last year, compared with 29 per cent of boys, while 59 per cent of boys of the same age reported fighting in the last year, compared with only 33 per cent of girls. At age 15, boys were three times more likely than girls to carry a weapon and twice as likely to be involved in fighting. The higher rates of general delinquency among boys were largely explained by the boys' lifestyles, which provided more opportunities to offend, by the influence of friends, by higher rates of crime victimization, and by weakened adult supervision and moral beliefs. By contrast, these and other factors covered by the study could not explain the difference between boys and girls in serious delinquency. Only 1 in 5 persistent truants at primary school were girls, but this increased to 3 in 5 by the third year of secondary school--overtaking the boys. By contrast, boys were much more likely to be excluded from school than girls--74 per cent of those excluded in the third year of secondary school were boys. Truants were more likely to smoke, drink, and use illegal drugs than non-truanting pupils. At age 15, half of all truants reported using drugs during the last year. This increased to two-thirds amongst the long-term truants. Factors such as weak parental supervision, dislike of school, and lack of self-control help to explain both why young people use substances and why they skip school. After allowing for these other factors, there was still a direct link between using substances and truanting--for example, being out of school provides more opportunities for smoking, drinking, and taking drugs.