Parenting, Immigration and Juvenile Delinquency
How do immigrant parents of teenage delinquents perceive the situation?
The parents of teenagers in immigrant families involved in criminal activities play an important part in rehabilitating their children, but very little research examines the point of view of these parents. Research that views the parents as subjects and deals with the question of how a parent of adolescents involved in crime intersects with the status of immigrant parents might shed light on the matter. The research of Prof. Sophie Walsh of the Bar-Ilan University Department of Criminology and Dr. Liat Yakhnich of the Beit Berl College investigated how immigrant parents perceive the involvement of their children in criminal behavior, through their own eyes, and how they are perceived as parents in their own eyes, in this situation.
The research included 14 semi-structured interviews with ten mothers and four fathers, immigrants from the former USSR who now live in Israel and whose children are being held at juvenile delinquent rehabilitation centers. They found that the parents related the gradual decline in their children’s behavior to three main factors: the developmental stage of adolescence, pressures involving immigration, and cultural conflicts. Those three factors are interwoven together to create a tapestry which the parents view as the backdrop of their children’s decline into criminal activities. They described their varied experiences as parents and fought to put together varied and contradictory parenting experiences. They described a crisis of parenting identity, an experience that left them shaken and included shame, guilt and concealment. Their coping with a child who breaks the law included a reconstruction of the undermined experience of ‘self’.
Despite the significant role they play in rehabilitating their children, as well as the distress they themselves experience, the behavior of parents of children involved in crime has not been investigated until now. Understanding the point of view of the parents and the experiences they go through will allow for the development of suitable treatment strategies that will support them and strengthen their ability to support their children.