Juvenile deviance and the lack of maternal cares

One of the main fields of investigation concerns the absence of mothering during the childhood.

Researches in the behaviorism and developmental psychology branch confer to the need of maternal contact a primary role in the construction of cognitive maps dedicated to cope with the pulses. Indeed, it emerged from these researches the existence of a biological union between mother and son ^[1], in which the intimacy, as is, the child resent of every alteration that goes to invalidate this biological union.

Fundamental contribution to the study of relations between the lack of mothering and juvenile deviance, was given by the British psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who developed the theory of the attachment.

The author speculates about the subsistence, since birth, of a motivational system in innate bases, which he denominates attachment system, which has the goal to keep balanced internal security conditions with the external conditions, as a result in which the person is.

The attachment system is, therefore, conceptualized in terms of homeostatic system: it has the function to keep the balance of the internal and external security conditions, activating mental mechanisms which elaborate the pieces of information that come either from the inside and outside of the person itself ^[2]. Orienting so the behavior of the person, it would act within the social reality.

According to the British psychoanalyst, the major object of attachment is the mother, meanwhile he uses the term "caregiver" to talk about the substitute figure of motherly cares.

The link of the child to the maternal figure would develop gradually according to the age.

In particular, from the second year of life, when the child is able to elaborate internal representations, grows a model of the Self, of others and of significant relations.

These representations are defined as "Internal Working Model" and according to Bowlby they are prospected as operating models worldwide and of the self, through which the person is able to feel the events and so to elaborate its programs.

In the construction of these models, fundamental is the notion that the person has of its attachment figures. Indeed, the newborn, once it is touched by the adult age it will refer to the same attachment methods which contributed to form its personal experience.

The attachment theory was enhanced with the contributions given by Mary Ainsworth, who gave us three typologies of attachment.

The first form is referred as "safe attachment";it is between mother and son and is an intense affective link. Thanks to this strong link, the baby develops the ability to use the mother as a safe haven and therefore could feel safer in expressing his/her sad and anxious emotions as well as of happiness.

The second form is called "insecure- ambivalent attachment" and is based on the unpredictability of the mother to answer to the needs of her child. This unpredictability will lead the baby to assume an incoherent behavior which will balance between anger moments and search of love moments.

The third and last form is "insecure - avoidant attachment". In this case, children adopt a particular strategy, based on the exhibition of a false autonomy and on the suppression of all emotions suitable for the situation. This behavior is typical of those children who put into effect, during the first year, the systematic refusal of their affective needs.

Finally, it was discovered a category referred to as "can't classify", in which there are all the behaviors of the children that could not be put into one of the above group.

Later studies have allowed to recognize in the behaviors of this last group a common denominator from where it has been developed a new form of attachment: the disorganized – disoriented attachment.

The child that established this type of link, shows signs of confusion and conflict, characterized from the recourse to a strange mix of strategies of configuration avoiding and ambivalent.

Other researches have registered this as a category characterized by a low socio cultural level, parental psychopathology, negligence, maltreatment and abuse either physical and sexual ^[3].

The grown child will generalize to other adults as the attachment strategies, obtained on behalf of the relation with the mother since its first days of life.

For instance, people who developed an ambivalent attachment link will create a mental image of the attachment figure and external reality as unpredictable, unreliable, utterly dangerous and hostile and vice-versa will create a mental image of self as vulnerable and constantly at risk, incapable of confrontation on the difficulty of life ^[4].

Bowlby used the results of his studies to better comprehend the dynamics under the relations between lack of mothering and deviance.

As a matter of fact, a study in Child Guidance Clinic of London confronted two groups of forty-four guys, a group made of minor thieves and one made of guys with different disturbs, both of the same age and gender.

Confronting both, it emerged that the 40% of thieves (seventeen of them) had suffered, in the first five years of life, a long period of separation from its mother or the substitutive figure of the mother ^[5].

This would confirm though the theory that configures the long separation of a child from its attachment figure, as assumed for the formation of an antisocial character and a persistent deficiency behavior^[6].

The attachment theory, as well as theoretical, had deep practical consequences on the politics of prevention and treatment of minor delinquency.

For a period there was a trend, especially from the minor Courts, to keep the children in familiar situations even devastating and intolerable, in order not to put the children in institutes ^[7].

In this regard it may be interesting totell the story of a psychiatric patient, who spent its first year of life in condition of extreme poverty together with his mom who lived alone.

Consequently the child was distanced from the mother and given in custody to various institutes where he suffered serious abuses. And nevertheless, when he became a psychiatric patient, his conditions got better faster than other patients whose stories presented abuses less serious.

According to some authors the fact he did not suffer anymore of his symptoms could be tracked in the possibility that, no matter the poverty situation in which he lived, he could have find happiness in the mothering capable of true love, protection and real security in his first and most important years of life.

Therefore, he had been better equipped in order to process the abuses received instead of someone whose integrity had been injured since the first days of life ^[8].

To grow up in harmony, the child needs to receive attention and protection from the adults who would help him to take the right orientation in life.

In case this vital needs are frustrated, his integrity is injured in an almost unrepairable way.

The normal reaction to injuries of the integrity would be of anger, pain, impotence and desperation. These feelings – even if divided, through cancellation mechanisms, from the background who motivated them – kept to express themselves in destructive acts against the others (criminality and slaughter) or against themselves (drug dependence, alcoholism, prostitution, psycho disturbs, suicide).

From here the greatest importance for parents, lawyers, judges, doctors and social assistants to gain the awareness that traumatic experiences happened in the childhood are stored in the memory and after a rearrangement to a subconscious level continue to have power in the life of the now adult child ^[9].

Thanks to this knowledges, every worker called to work with the minor will be able to see in every deviant behavior, even the more absurd, the logic hide until that moment so to be able to create a path, even an institutional one, to delimit the phenomenon of juvenile deviance.

Notes

^[1] A. Franchini, F.Introna, Delinquenza minorile, Padova, Edizioni Cedam, 1972, p.168;

^[2] G.Attili, Attaccamento e Amore, Bologna, il Mulino, 2006, p. 25;

^[3] G. Attili, Attaccamento e costruzione evoluzionistica della mente, Raffaele Cortina Editore, 2007, p. 21-35;

^[4] C. Benelli, S.Pieri, F. Soldi, L'attaccamento nel ciclo vitale in www.ifefromm.it (Consultato il 20/01/16);

^[5] Bandini, Gatti, Delinquenza giovanile, Milano, A. Giuffré Editore, 1987, p.63; 

^[6] A. Franchini, F.Introna, Delinquenza minorile, Padova, Edizioni Cedam, 1972, p.569;

^[7] H. Mannheim, Trattato di criminologia comparata. Volume secondo, Torino, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1975;

^[8] A.Miller, Il dramma del bambino dotato e la ricerca del verso sé, Bollati Boringhieri, 2010 pp. 49-50;

^[9]A.Miller, Il dramma del bambino dotato e la ricerca del vero sé, Bollati Boringhieri, 2010 pp. 125-126-127.,