…for violent and property offences—even after statistical controls for many confounders.
These are not deterministic for every individual, but they are robust population-level patterns.
Father absence functions as one of several interacting risk amplifiers for the exact downstream problems (mental illness, addiction, poor impulse control, poor regulation of negative emotions and homelessness) that feed into the visible increase in street disorder over the past six or so decades.
Exposure to single-parent households during childhood is consistently associated in New Zealand and international longitudinal data with elevated externalising behaviours in boys and young men, including higher rates of aggression, delinquency, and later violent offending.
The same family-structure patterns also correlate with increased internalising difficulties—depression, anxiety, and self-harm—which contribute to the development of ‘violence turned inward’, the turn of violence that is made manifest in elevated youth suicide rates in recent times relative to sixty years ago.
Now, to be clear, these effects are not deterministic for any individual but help explain why suicide rates remain markedly higher among young Maori males than among other demographic groups in New Zealand, and why New Zealand’s youth suicide figures have ranked among the highest in the OECD in multiple recent reporting periods.
When combined with welfare incentives that can subsidise staying outside stable housing, rising methamphetamine availability, and untreated mental health needs, father absence adds measurable weight to the pathways that leave some men chronically rough sleeping, begging, welfare system and drug-dependent, and unable to sustain the relationships or emotional/personal self-regulation and accountability required for the sort ordinary civic life that leads to individuals flourishing, for example by raising families of their own in loving relationships.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
The contraceptive pill technology side-bar
This modern-day analytical ‘lens’ is also grounded in data and evidence. Reliable contraception welfare support declining social stigma around single motherhood has produced more out-of-wedlock births and solo parenting than the pre-pill era’s shotgun marriages or, relative to the present, rare abortions.
Imperfect real-world use of the pill by flawed human beings reducing its efficacy from near 100% in the laboratory to near 90% in real use, plus changed sexual norms amplified the effect. This is documented in economic and demographic literature.
What I am describing here is accumulated incentive structures and cultural/technological changes over 50–70 years that have made certain dysfunctional pathways more viable and less penalised for young people, society’s most vulnerable, than before.
Bad individual decisions still occur within those structures, and personal agency remains real. Many people with terrible hands dealt to them in life do not end up chronically homeless and using drugs publicly as a selfish/self destructive way of life.
The mix I have described above is what makes this a human problem that is a wicked problem for any government to intervene in, in order to ‘solve’ regardless of political persuasion, Conservative or gay-race-communist.
The alternative to move-on powers
If police cannot practically move people on from persistent rough sleeping, begging that harasses, or behaviour tied to open daily drug use and mental health crises to the point of public, extremely heavy-mouthed or violent psychotic breaks that make public spaces unusable, a free-range lunatic asylum, the default becomes, has become, a managed decline of the public commons.
We have seen versions of this in parts of San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities that prioritised non-enforcement and “housing first” without strong behavioural conditions. Visible encampments, open drug scenes, needles, human waste, […]
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