A NEW STUDY SHOWS THAT, IF CRIME IS TO BE REDUCED, THEN GOVERNMENT SHOULD ADVISE MORE PEOPLE TO MARRY....... DO YOU AGREE?

A new study has revealed that marriage can potentially help in reducing crime simply because people who are married tend to develop significantly greater self-control and responsibility.

In other words, the issue of marriage is important because it creates a mutual-dependent system of obligation, mutual support, and restraint by couples in doing certain things.

This probably explains some of the differences between married and single people in terms of behaviour, sense of responsibility, disposition, accountability, belief and reasoning, beyond the issue of being responsible for self only.

According to Wikipedia, marriage is a socially or ritually recognised union or legal contract between spouses, usually between a man and woman, that establishes rights and obligations between them, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws.

According to the study, people who are married are less likely to a significant extent, engage in crime such as robbery, assault, or theft because the marriage enables them to develop greater self-control and higher responsibility for themselves and their dependants.

In the study, which examined changes in marital status and self-control between late adolescence and early adulthood, one factor the researchers looked at in measuring levels of self-control was marijuana use.

The study, carried out by Dr. Walter Forrest, a senior lecturer in Criminology at Monash University, Australia and Associate Professor Carter Hay, from Florida State University, United States, found that young marijuana users who went on to marry were less likely to have continued using the drug than those who remained single.

It also uncovered the fact that a key reason for the change was that those who married also experienced significant improvements in self-control, given that most couples, in most cases, probably expect one another to be attentive, considerate, responsible, and reliable. The researchers found that there is an empirical association between the occurrence of key life events such as marriage, employment, and military service, and desistance from crime.

The study, titled, “Life-Course transitions, self-control, and desistance from crime,” which was based on analyses of the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a nationally representative survey of American adolescents and young adults, showed that there is a relationship between these life-course transitions and changes in criminal behaviour.

“Self-control, which is significantly influenced by marriage, is one of the strongest predictors of differences between people in terms of their involvement in crime; hence, our study shows that improvements in a person’s level of self-control are related to changes in their involvement in crime over time. It also shows that marriage is a significant source of those improvements,” Forrest said.

According to Forrest, most people seem to develop greater self-control as they get older, but the self-control is greater in married people, regardless of the age at which they married. In other words, marriage contributes to the development of self-control because it provides new standards of behaviour as well as a reason to maintain the standards.

“Those increases in self-control, in part, explain why people are less likely to be involved in crime when they are married than when they are single.

“And, as any married men or women know, couples are rarely shy about telling one another when they have failed to live up to those standards. We think that helps provide people with practice regulating their behaviour,” he added.

According to a post on healthmarriageinfo.org, many criminologists have assumed that marriage helps reduce crime because married people feel they have more to lose by committing crime or tend to think about how their spouses might react when deciding how to act in different situations.

According to Robert J. Sampson, a professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University and his colleagues in their study, titled, “Does marriage reduce crime? A counterfactual approach to within-individual causal effects,” a change in criminal behaviour may occur in response to the attachment or social bond that forms as a result of marriage. Consequently, the social tie of marriage is important.

“A second reason marriage might influence desistance from crime is because it leads to significant changes in everyday routines and patterns of association with others. Marriage entails numerous obligations that tend to reduce leisure activities outside the family. It is reasonable to assume that the same person with crime tendencies, when married, will spend less time with same-sex peers than when not married or before marriage.

“Parenting responsibilities can also lead to changes in routine activities because more time is spent in family-centred activities than in unstructured time with peers.

“A third, and perhaps more intriguing theoretically, reason is marriage may lead to gender-induced desistance from crime because of the direct social control exerted by female spouses over their husbands. This seems particularly true of marriages in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was common for wives to limit the number of nights men could ‘hang with the guys,’ thus affecting their association with peers.

“Along with providing a base of social support, many wives in this era also took control of the planning and management of household activities and acted as informal guardians of their husbands’ social lives. The economic support obligation by the male partner to the family is a given,” the researchers said.

They noted that an unanswered question is whether the hypothesised crime suppression benefits of marriage extend to those involved in cohabitation or other arrangements, while some other researchers found that both marriage and cohabitation were associated with decreases in binge drinking and marijuana use, even though the reduction was greater in marriage compared to cohabitation. They concluded that there is a social control provided by social integration of marriage.

Also, a sociologist, Prof. Linda Waite, made the case that married couples exhibit a greater sense of long-term responsibility and commitment toward each other than is evident in cohabitation.

Reacting to the study, a clinical psychologist, Miss Oladele Olaitan, noted that married people are less likely to commit crime than single people for reasons ranging from higher level of social support that comes with being married to reduction in idleness and loneliness that often lead to committing crime.

“People naturally will want to fit into the societal expectation of being responsible because they are now married. Also if there is a psychiatric or a psychological condition that can result into any form of crime, it can easily be identified by the spouse before it gets out of hand.

“In addition, married people would have the feeling that they have more to lose, because they are now accountable not only to their own families and friends but also to their spouses, children and in some cases in-laws,” she said.

She said the quality of the marriage as well as the type of spouse, whether deviant or otherwise, also has a role to play.

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About Unknown

Deji Sadiq, a.k.a DEJI OF LAGOS is a LASU trained Economist turned freelance journalist, a Blogger, an information strategist, a public affairs analyst and a committed activist with a passion for equal opportunities.