UF study: Americans give mixed reviews to parental responsibility laws

March 14, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Americans believe parents bear some responsibility when their children break the law but are reluctant to throw the book at mom and dad when the kids go awry, says a University of Florida researcher.

“The desire to get tough on juvenile crime has led to more broadly defined parental responsibility laws, but we found that public support for these measures is actually relatively low,” said Eve Brank, a psychologist in UF’s criminology department who led a national study of parental responsibility law.

The parental responsibility laws, which hold mothers and fathers responsible for their children’s crimes, have developed as one solution to the public outcry against juvenile delinquency, Brank said. The issue of whether parents should be held responsible was raised in the 1999 Columbine school shootings, as well as in other episodes of juvenile violence in recent years, but Brank’s study is the first to determine whether the public supports parental responsibility laws, she said.

Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed in the study said parents of teenagers who commit crimes were most responsible, in addition to the teenager. Peers came in a distant second at 22 percent, followed by the media, 9 percent, and the schools, less than 1 percent.

Few people supported blaming and punishing only the parents, Brank said.

“The survey respondents might have viewed parents as morally responsible for the actions of their children but thought that imposing a legal punishment on only the parents was too harsh and took the notion of responsibility too far,” she said. “It’s also possible they were thinking only of traditional criminal punishments, such as imprisonment and fines, when asked about punishing parents.”

The study, which Brank did with Victoria Weisz, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska’s Center on Children, Families and the Law, appears in the September-October issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice.

The question about parental responsibility was included as part of a larger national Gallup Organization telephone survey conducted in November 1999. Using random digit dialing, a total of 469 men and 519 women were asked: “When a teenager commits a crime, which of the following is most responsible, in addition to the teenager: parents, peers, media or school?” They also were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statements, “Parents are to blame when their child breaks the law” and “Parents should be punished when their child breaks the law.”

Juveniles are being tried as adults at younger ages and for a wider variety of crimes as part of a trend to place greater emphasis on punishment than rehabilitation, Brank said.

Although the public believes juvenile crime is increasing, the opposite is actually true, with a 58 percent decline in juvenile homicides since 1994, Brank said. Another study showed Americans mistakenly believed juveniles were responsible for 53 percent of the homicides in the United States, when, in fact, they were responsible for about 9 percent, she said.

The idea of parents taking responsibility for their children’s crimes is not new, Brank said. The oldest form is civil liability statutes, in place in every state, which allow cases to be brought against parents for malicious acts their children knowingly committed but limit the amount of damages that can be received, she said.

“Even personal injury cases may be set at $2,000, $3,000 or $5,000, depending upon the state, so you’re not going to get fully compensated using these laws, but it’s a very easy case to prove,” she said.

A second kind of law, not limited strictly to parents, can be applied to adults who encourage or somehow contribute to a child becoming delinquent, Brank said. An extreme example might be involving youths in a parent’s gang or having a child deliver drugs for the parent, she said.

The third and newest type is receiving increasing public attention, Brank said. These are much more open-ended laws that vary widely across states and often allow courts to involve parents of delinquent children in any way they see fit, she said.

The parents can be ordered to participate in counseling, probation and other aspects of the court proceedings, Brank said. They may be held responsible for the child completing community service hours or ordered to perform community service themselves, she said.

At least 36 states have mandated some type of responsibility provision beyond civil liability for parents or guardians of delinquent children, according to the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In the past two years, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas have enacted legislation that requires children and parents to participate in community service activities after the youth has been in trouble with the law.

Jerry Tyler, a sociologist at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, said Brank’s research is timely and an area that needs greater emphasis. “She appropriately identifies one major problem as a general lack of understanding as to what parental responsibility truly means,” he said. “At the same time, she touches on the misperceptions as to the magnitude of juvenile crime.”