Broken Homes

One of the juveniles indicated that he left his home and began living on the street when his mother died and his father married another woman. The step mother started torturing him. In order to cope with the cold nights, he started taking drugs, upon the advice of a more seasoned street child and juvenile. Yet another juvenile claimed that when his parents divorced, his father, who was an alcoholic, took custody of him. His mother got married to another man who did not allow her to bring her children from her previous marriage to her new home. The juvenile ran away from home and went to a town called Masaka where he was introduced to crime. This cause fits in with Gorman-Smith et al.’s (1998) theory that families that are divorced are more prone to child delinquency than those that are not divorced (p26). Further, Rutter and Smith (1995) observe that a family as a source of delinquency has four paradigms: the neglect paradigm, conflict paradigm, divergent behaviour and value paradigm and disruption paradigm (p450).