Although for decades child abuse has proven to be a significant cause of serious delinquency and results in a multigenerational cycle of violence, recent studies have shown that severe parental neglect is as likely as physical abuse to lead to serious delinquency. Even in the vast majority of homes where parents are not abusive or criminally neglectful, children are more likely to become seriously delinquent if their mothers, fathers, or caregivers lack good parenting skills or the ability to provide ongoing supervision. Attachment to and achievement in school are both powerful predictors of whether or not children will be seriously delinquent. Because some schools have ten times the violence of others, the choice of a particular school can greatly increase or decrease a child's exposure to violence. However, even adolescents who do well in school spend most of their waking hours outside school.
Some communities have homicide rates twenty times higher than the national average.
According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, most serious juvenile crime is concentrated in a handful of communities. At greatest risk for violence and victimization are children and adolescents who live in high-crime neighborhoods. Adolescent boys and girls seek out risk-taking group activities as a normal and necessary part of their development. Children who are frequently exposed to unchecked violence among neighborhood children their own age are most likely to become persistently delinquent and increasingly violent. Teens who are gang members commit more property and drug crimes than other children their age.