Juvenile Crime | The Root Cause of Juvenile Crime and Violence Is Fatherlessness

The continuing rise in illegitimacy rates is terrible news not just for the children themselves, but for every potential crime victim in America. For all the talk about the complexities of the “root causes” of crime, there is one root cause which overwhelms all the rest: fatherlessness.

As Pat Moynihan wrote in 1965: “From the wild Irish slums of the nineteenth-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by...

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