To wonder what happens? Parents of Children commit serious crime.

Of course. Your upbringing has a huge influence on the person you become. Of course it does.

But my point stands that it is not just nurture. If you’re just blaming the parents every time a child commits a serious crime, then you’re missing out a huge part of the reason behind it.

It’s not just a person’s upbringing. If it was, then every child who grew up with less than perfect parents would be a criminal and those who were brought up by the equivalent of Mary Poppins would be perfectly adjusted members of society. It’s genetics as well. You can’t take one into account without considering the other.

You've just oversimplified as well - two siblings can't be brought up identically because they're two different people, two different personalities with differences in their relationships with their parents.

Me & my sister for example (neither of us has committed a crime afaik), 3 years age difference, I had the classic older child experience of parents being more strict while my sister had a lot more freedom at a younger age. We weren't brought up identically.

A girl that my parents fostered for a while had a teenage daughter who was involved in a murder and her younger children were not taken into care.

Absolutely this (including the recent case in Southport).

Sadly, "prevention" is not a cause people who hold the purse strings like to fund as it is really, really difficult to 'measure'.
Hence them getting away with decimating Youth services over the last 10 - 15 years, and slashing the funding for the wonderful SureStart Children's Centres.

In most of the stabbings carried out by teens at the moment the lad that dies is as involved in the whole culture as the accused. Both wandering the streets carrying knives. Whereas I think everyone would acknowledge there are all sorts of influences on our lives, you would be very naive to think parents couldn't have had a more positive influence

Again, I think that this is over simplifying it and ignoring some really important factors. You’re taking a very specific type of crime involving very specific perpetrators. Looking at the people involved in knife crime, the vast majority are male, of a similar age and from a similar economic background. Their raging hormones and their surroundings are going to have had a huge influence. Far, far more than their parents. All of those middle class parents that stretch themselves to live in a posh area and send their DC to a good school so their DC won’t be associating with kids from council estates know that teens will take far more notice of other teens than their parents. Otherwise they’d be safe in the knowledge that their superior parenting skills and anti-knife crime attitudes would be enough to protect their own DC from getting involved in that sort of thing. Of course there will be parents who shouldn’t have been allowed to care for a goldfish, let alone a child, but there will be just as many who are good decent people who were horrified to discover that their child was carrying a knife.

Anyone who thinks that their parenting is loving and supportive and strict enough to protect their child from knife crime needs to speak to one of the anti knife crime groups that have sprung up in recent years. I think you’d be in for a rude awakening.

It depends on the situation at home, a lot of time it is outside influences that can cause a child to commit a serious crime.

Yes, I came to say this.

I think every single one of us could be pretty evil under the right circumstances. Yet, psychopaths are born and I absolutely agree there are genetic factors influencing sociopathy.

No two sibling childhoods are ever the same, even with the same parents and same treatment and exposures. Because differences in temperament and a susceptibility to say sociopathy will influence.

I have a sibling I determine to be sociopathic. I am not.

I recall the story regarding the young boy Paris who murdered his sister. There was something very very different there apparent from quite early.

People still now analyse all the failings of Dahmers parents. And there were a fair amount. Yet did anyone ever ask, did the mother do a runner when Dahmer was 17 with the younger son because she knew instinctively he was very scary.

So no. The parents absolutely always must be considered and assessed separately in every single case and I believe are so in order to determine any risks.

It's not about blame, but it's reality that your childhood and any adverse childhood events significantly affect you. There's a reason care experienced children are more likely to enter the criminal justice system and have significantly higher rates of mental health difficulties.

There is tons of research to back up the link between things like poverty and generational trauma with crime.

Anyway, it will depend on the circumstances. If you have abusive parents misusing drugs, then that's different to an average working class family whose kid has been sucked into the wrong crowd.

Anyone is capable of committing a crime, but it's foolish to thing our early years and relationships with our attachment figures don't significantly impact how we relate to the world. A lot of the prison population, particularly women's prison, are vulnerable people in their own right.

There are cases of young people who are seriously mentally unwell whose parents have spent years trying to get appropriate help and who have been totally failed by the state and society.

Teen child of a family member committed a horrible crime, not murder but bad enough that they were jailed for ten years. It had nothing to do with their upbringing and was an act of utter, utter stupidity from someone who was definitely brought up to know better (and was rightly jailed for that stupidity, even by their own admission).

The other children aren't automatically subject to a safeguarding review and Social Services don't automatically become involved, this is only triggered if there are concerns that the child's home life might have contributed to their crime or if there are concerns that other children/adults in the home might be at risk. This is assessed by the police during their arrest, interview, and charging procedures. There were no safeguarding concerns in relation to my relatives' family/home so there was no SS involvement and no safeguarding assessment.

There are incredibly rare incidents, the type where everyone remembers the name of the perpetrator, where there might be one person who seems to have just been born evil, but this is not the case in the overwhelming majority of killings.

In most of the stabbings carried out by teens at the moment the lad that dies is as involved in the whole culture as the accused. Both wandering the streets carrying knives. Whereas I think everyone would acknowledge there are all sorts of influences on our lives, you would be very naive to think parents couldn't have had a more positive influence.

Social services will be involved simply because having a sibling who commits that kind of crime can be very damaging regardless of any other factors

This.

It’s complex, and involves an interplay of nature and nurture. Nature can load the bullet, but nurture can determine whether the trigger is ever pulled or not.

For example, someone can indeed be born with a predisposition towards, and later develop, psychopathy (or ASPD), but it doesn’t automatically follow that a psychopath will be a criminal, or present as a ‘bad’ person (and indeed, I believe the majority are not criminal). James Fallon is an interesting example, a neuroscientist studying the brains of serial killers that discovered his own brain presented as psychopathic, and that he also had a particular variant of a gene that is linked to violence and aggression:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/

My eldest son (audhd) was arrested for looking at illegal images a week after his 18th birthday. I still had a 15 and a 11 yo at home. In the immediate aftermath he was bailed and stayed at home. My daughter and I went to stay at my sister’s and my son had to stay with my eldest daughter until social services had done an assessment and we had got my son settled into a flat with his dad a few weeks after. SS had no concerns about my parenting and understood that the ND and his other issues being groomed to be trans had led to him taking the very wrong path. SS gave us rules that were followed and checked in 3 times by phone and that was it. Previously he had been a 100% rule follower and got excellent GCSEs and A levels etc. thankfully he has done the rehab stuff, the courses and 5 -6 years in he fully realises exactly what he did and why it was wrong etc. it was incredibly tough for our family, especially as he pleaded guilty but due to Covid it took two whole years to go to court for sentencing and then hit the news and our family was very well known in the local community. But we are still here and just living our lives. It does still take the breath out my entire body when I have a flash back to it happening in real time though. We had no idea at all and thought we had taken all the precautions. He can’t be alive with under 18s but he isn’t attracted to children at all thank God, he was just grossly irresponsible. His shpo is 10 years so Still a way to go.

I don’t think that’s true. Or at least it’s not the current thinking. They can’t diagnose psychopathy in young children (presumably because they’re still learning empathy etc? Just my guess) so saying someone is born a psychopath is sheer guesswork. There’s nothing scientific to back that up. By the time they can diagnose it, nurture will be part of the equation.

It completely depends on the circumstances.
If the child convicted has siblings then it would automatically trigger a safeguarding enquiry for each of those children.

The safeguarding panel would act in the childs best interest. The decision making is complex & based on each individual situation.

Yeah, to an extent, I am.

I totally agree that there are cases where you could predict a child’s outcome just by looking at their terrible surroundings. But there are enough murderers who have come from nice families where their siblings are perfect lovely people who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

I don’t think it’s a case of ‘it must be the parents’ in most cases. Brains and genetics are more complicated than that.

I think it may depend on the type of crime and the age of the child.
But usually there will be some SS involvement, even if it's cursory safeguard concerns for other children in the family.

There were significant reports about the families of James Bulgers killers, none of it very palatable.

I think you’ll find people are generally born psychopaths. Sociopaths are generally made but they can also be born inherently sociopathic.

I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m happy to be corrected by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, but I think you’ve massively oversimplified this to the point that it’s just completely incorrect.

It’s the old debate of nature versus nurture. Yes, environmental factors are incredibly important, but our genetics influence us to how we respond to those factors. Hence two siblings brought up identically and one becomes a serial killer while the other becomes a surgeon. And obviously not everyone who commits serious crime is a psychopath. Some will be plain evil from wonderful homes, and some will be tragic figures who never stood a chance. The point is, you can’t just blame the parents in many cases, because they won’t have done anything wrong.

@WilfredsPies Are you contesting that thought ?

In the US recently the parents of a school shooter were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to at least 10 years in prison. They'd bought him a gun as a present.

Of course it does.
No child is born evil.

Thats not to say it is always the parents. There is so many outside influences. But that all counts as "upbringing"

Just to clarify, are you saying that a child’s upbringing will have some connection to whether or not they commit crime?

Of course upbringing has some responsibility.