Taking the long view

SEX DIFFERECENCES IN ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR: Conduct Disorder, Delinquency and Violence in the Dunedin Longitudinal Study

by Terrie E. Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi, Michael Rutter, Phil A. Silva

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (2001) ISBN 0521010667 £14.95 278pp

The antisocial activities of males and females ae especially alike when alchohol and drugs are involved, near the time of female puberty, and when females are yoked with males in intimate relationships.

Why do some members of our communities, especially children and adolescents, commit antisocial acts? And why, in particular, do boys and men transgress in this way more than girls and women?

To answer these fundamental questions, this scholarly study - published in a respected monograph series edited by Alfred Blumstein and David Farrington - makes use of fresh data drawn from following the lives of 1,000 males and females born in 1972 to 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand, and assessed at nine points between the ages of 3 to 21. Different measures of antisocial behaviour were used at each point, not least because 'whereas biting peers may have disappeared by adolescence, car theft has not yet emerged in childhood.'

The novelty afforded by the 20 year archive in the slow-burning Dunedin Study lies in its tracking of age and gender: 'Unlike previous studies of sex differences, we incorporate information about how antisocial behaviour changes with age over the first two decades of life, a stage when it emerges, peaks, and consolidates into antisocial disorders and serious crime. Unlike previous studies of age effects on antisocial behaviour, we incorporate information about sex differences.' This is key as there is much research literature which focuses on just one sex (often males), but 'single-sex studies cannot address the sex-specificity of their findings.' This novelty is underlined by the point that the first epidemiological study of childhood antisocial behaviour - the Isle of Wight Study - was conducted as recently as the 1960s.

One of the four authors is Director Emeritus of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit; the other three are all professors at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London (two of the latter also holding posts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). The academic disciplines which meet in this hugely impressive scholarly study are developmental psychology, psychiatry and criminology. Indeed, this interdisciplinary fusion will leave 'monofocal' approaches looking embarrassingly exposed.

This interdisciplinarity is reflected in the two basic explanations for antisocial behaviour which the book proffers. On the one hand, the authors identify 'a disorder having neuro-developmental origins that, alongside autism, hyperactivity, and dyslexia, [which] shows a strong male preponderance, early childhood onset, subsequent persistence, and low prevalence in the population'. We learn that 'extreme sex differences are linked with this form'. On the other hand, the authors assert that 'the bulk of antisocial behaviour, especially by females, is best understood as a social phenomenon originating in the context of social relationships, with onset in adolescence, and high prevalence.'

Here we learn that 'sex differences linked with this form are negligible; for example, the antisocial activities of males and females are especially alike when alcohol and drugs are involved, near the time of female puberty, and when females are yoked with males in intimate relationships.'

This means that although common sense and empirical research may highlight male transgression of social rules, 'the overarching conclusion' of this book is that 'females' antisocial behaviour obeys the same causal laws as males' '. In other words, 'females are unlikely to develop the neuro-developmental form because they are unlikely to have the risk factors for it, whereas they are as likely as male to develop the socially influenced form because they share with males the risk factors for it.' Such findings are striking in the context of a broadsheet concern for the apparent alienation experienced by large numbers of adolescent boys and young men in our society.

Indeed, as each chapter - concluding its academic prose with nugget-size 'take-home messages' and 'unanswered questions' - was consumed as I travelled back and forth every day on the train past the Feltham Young Offenders' Institution, I find it hard to overemphasise its pertinence.

The book leaves one with a strong sense of the interconnectedness of genders and generations in the patterns of antisocial behaviour: 'Both antisocial males and females were highly likely to become intimate with an antisocial mate, to produce babies while they were still in their teens, and to engage in domestic violence in their homes, thus setting the stage of risk for the next generation.' A take-home message for a take-away generation, perhaps. But one which invites us to stomach the unanswered question of how to break such a cycle. 'Work in progress', or regress, depending upon one's end of the social policy telescope.

NICHOLAS WHITE

Dr. Nicholas White is senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of publications on the family in literature, including The Family in Crisis (Cambridge, 1999).

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