Influence of gender and other structural factors on violent delinquent behaviours among students in Sub-Sahara Africa: Echoes from Nigerian experience

Abstract

The rising rate of violent delinquent ways of behaving among teenagers and youths is troubling, and pressing consideration is expected to alter the course. The main objective of this study is to explore how violent juvenile delinquency among students-adolescent and youths- are influenced by gender and social structures like family, peer group, and school management. The quantitative research utilized questionnaires to gather essential primary data from randomly selected sample of 150 respondents. The result reveals a significant contribution of structural factors of gender, school management, peer groups to violent delinquent behaviors. It shows that they altogether affect the degree of youngsters' violent delinquent behavior. In this study, family structure only had a composite effect. However, a number of previous studies demonstrate a strong link between family structure and juvenile delinquency. They suggest that family structure should be taken into consideration as one of the factors in violent delinquency. This study reveals that, school management made the most significant contribution (Beta = .479; t = 2.809; P < 0.05) to the prediction, thus stronger in relationship between it and violent delinquency, while socio-economic status has the least contribution (Beta = .175; t = 2.034; P < 0.05) to the perceived delinquent behaviour of the studied population, thus has weakest relationship. Other variables made significant contributions in the following order: peer influence (Beta = .425; t = 2.482; P < 0.05); family structure (Beta = 1.185; t = 4.265; P < 0.05) and gender (Beta = 1.096; t = 3.725; P < 0.05).