Study Finds Correlation Between Youth Delinquency and Violent Death Among Young Adult Women

A new study led by a professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University in Illinois, finds that delinquency in youths has a high correlation with violent death among young adults. And the correlation is particularly strong for young women.

The study looked at 1,829 youth between the ages of 10 and 18 who were detained in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago between the years 1995 to 1998. Of the original participants in the study, 111 had died by 2014. Of those that had died, 75 were victims of homicide. The results showed that death rates for delinquent girls were five times the death rate of girls in the same age group in the general population. For Hispanic girls, the death rate for youths who were delinquents was nine times higher than the rate for Hispanic girls who were not delinquents.

Linda Teplin, the Owen L. Coon Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and the lead author of the study, stated, “Our findings are shocking. Death rates in our sample of delinquent youth, ages 15 to 19, are nearly twice those of troops in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The article, “Firearm Homicide and Other Causes of Death in Delinquents: A 16-Year Prospective Study,” was published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It may be accessed here.