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Fatherlessness drives violent crime. But a father’s commitment to his wife and children destroys violence before it can begin. Let’s become the change we seek for our children.

Youth crime and violence are on the rise across Australia. A recent article in The Guardian sadly reads, “Victoria’s crime rate surges with young offenders contributing to record arrests”.

The state’s overall offence rate has increased by 15% but youth crime has seen an even bigger increase.

“Youth offending also continues to grow, with crimes committed by children aged 10 to 17 up 17.9%. It is the second quarter in a row that youth crime rates have reached record levels. Police said children (10 – 17 yrs) only accounted for 13.1% of all offenders, but they were overrepresented in serious and violent crimes such as robberies (63.1%), aggravated burglaries (46%) and car theft (26.9%).”

Fatherlessness Drives Violent Crime

A 2004 study in the USA called “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration” showed that boys who are fatherless from birth are three times more likely to go to jail than peers from intact families.  While boys who do not see their father depart until they are 10 to 14 years old are over two times more likely to go to jail than peers from intact families.

Interestingly, Dr Pat Fagan showed that states in the USA with a lower percentage of single-parent families, on average, had lower rates of juvenile crime. State-by-state analysis indicated that, in general, a 10 per cent increase in the number of children living in single-parent homes (including divorces) accompanied a 17 per cent increase in juvenile crime.

Fagan, in his article, “The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community”, demonstrates the correlation between marriage and fatherhood and what the absence of both does to our children. Among married two-parent families, whether white or black, the crime rate was very low. The capacity and determination to maintain stable married relationships, not race, was the pivotal factor. Chaotic, broken communities resulted from chaotic, broken families.

Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson & Jack the Ripper Had One Thing in Common: Fatherlessness

Heidi Hollands from South Africa, in an article on fatherlessness, said:

“Some of the world’s nastiest dictators, torturers and assassins share a profoundly debilitating family feature: fatherlessness. Mugabe’s dad abandoned him as a 10-year-old. Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson and Lee Harvey Oswald all grew up without fathers. So did Adolph Hitler. Most of the criminals in South Africa’s prison population lack positive male role models of any sort… A Johannesburg-based criminologist, who blames absentee fathers for much of the violence in South Africa, says: ‘I have yet to meet the rapist with a functioning dad. A significant number of fatherless children, especially boys, look to gangs or follow other peer cultures that contradict traditional family values. For most kids in our society, men still represent the definition of authority.’”

Australian family researcher Bill Muehlenberg, in his Quadrant article “Fatherlessness, Violence and the British Malaise”, said:

“The London riots have simply reconfirmed and graphically illustrated what the social sciences have been telling us for a half century now: when we allow society to disregard the institution of marriage and, in fact, assault the institution of family, we are asking for – and will get – trouble.

The social science evidence on this is as overwhelming as it is clear: by every indicator, children will be worse off when not raised in a biological two-parent family. They will be more likely to do less well at school, to become involved in drugs, to commit suicide, to have a range of mental and psychological problems, and to get involved in gangs and criminal activity…

Even stronger connections between crime and family breakdown have been made by the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, which compared crime rates with out-of-wedlock birth rates from 1903 to 1993. It found that the ‘percentage of ex-nuptial births correlates significantly with both serious and violent crime at both one and two decades time lapse’…”

Fatherlessness Driving British Youth Crime

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He has worked with people for decades and knows full well the connections between family breakdown, fatherlessness and crime.

He says:

“British youth lead the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised.

“British children are much likelier to have a television in their bedroom than a father living at home. One-third of them never eat a meal at a table with another member of their household – family is not the word for the social arrangements of the people in the areas from which the rioters mainly come. They are therefore radically unsocialised and deeply egotistical…

“When we play fast and loose with fathers and marriage, we simply invite the sort of barbarism witnessed in London to become mainstream. We had better wise up before it is too late.”

Lovework

So, what is the answer? We know that alcohol, drugs and media violence play a major part in the mayhem, but we as dads have a responsibility “to become the change we seek”. Love is more powerful than hate – a father’s commitment to his wife and children destroys violence before it can begin.

Tim Hawkes’ brilliant but honest article, “What every dad must do if we’re to defeat violence”, gives us some of the keys as fathers. Read it if you dare! Tim shows how we can make the difference we desire.

Yours for dads defeating violence,

Warwick Marsh

PS: The Men’s Leadership Summit (8–10 August 2025) booking deadline has been extended to midnight Friday, 1^st August. Watch the video here. Book now here.

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Originally published at Dads4Kids. Image via Adobe.