A Gender-Specific Pathway to Serious, Violent, and Chronic Offending? Exploring Howell's Risk Factors for Serious Delinquency

In Preventing and Reducing Juvenile Delinquency, Howell proposes a female-specific pathway to serious, violent, and chronic offending. Incorporating ideas from feminist research about risk factors for female delinquency, he proposes five distinct and interrelated risk factors-child abuse victimization, mental health problems, running away, gang involvement, and juvenile justice involvement-as those that lead to serious, violent, and chronic offending for girls. This study is an exploration of Howell's hypothesis, assessing the independent effect of the suggested risk factors on girls' and boys' involvement in serious, violent, and chronic offending. The sample consists of 10,405 youths, one third of whom are females, who were referred to a metropolitan juvenile court in Texas and tracked in official records from 1997 to 2003. This large sample allows for robust statistical analysis of the independent effect of the risk factors on serious, violent, and chronic offending by gender.