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This paper re-examined the hypothesis that early adverse experiences are related to female delinquency. A number of arbitrary variables concerned with parental deprivation, birth order, family size, maternal and paternal ages and ratio male/female sibs were examined with respect to 121 delinquent girls in a special Training School. A group of similar socioeconomic status age and marital status from the population at large acted as controls. 61.5 per cent of the subjects had experienced prolonged parental loss, and a further 32 per cent had experienced at least one other lengthy separation. Absence of father or of both parents was commonest. Eighty per cent of the delinquent subjects who had experienced parental deprivation were the products of separation, divorce, placement in an institution because of the personal shortcomings of the subjects and/or their parents. This state of affairs was distinctly different from that of the control subjects. Further, the delinquent girls were derived from large families with younger than average parents, the intermediate female children being most likely to be affected. Several conclusions appear to follow, the role of the absent father, the effect of the actual physical presence of mother rather than her absence, and the influence of institutional life in the development of subsequent delinquency. The literature is reviewed with relevance to these findings.

153 depressive in-patients and a matched group of 163 psychiatrically normal controls were compared in order to examine certain aspects of parental deprivation in relation to depressive illness. These are the findings:— 1. Depressives as a whole show no greater liability than a group of control individuals to have lost a parent by death before their 16th birthday. 2. Severe depressives are more liable, and moderately severe depressives less liable, to have lost a parent by death before their 16th birthday as compared with normal controls. 3. Neither death of the father nor death of the mother appears to be of especial importance in the aetiology of depression, and there is no evidence that loss of the mother in early childhood predisposes to depressive illness. 4. There are indications that depressives as a whole are more likely than normal to have lost a father by death during the age period 11 to 15 years and that severe depressives are more likely than normal to have lost a mother by death during their childhood. However, neither of these findings quite reaches the level of statistical significance. 5. Death of a parent during childhood appears no more important in the aetiology of depressive illness than loss of a parent for causes other than death. 6. There is no evidence that death of a sib during the childhood of an individual predisposes him to depressive illness. 7. As compared with the controls, severe depressives report a highly significant excess of disturbed relationship with both mother and father during childhood, whereas moderately severe depressives show no excess over the controls in this respect. 8. Severe depressives have a significantly greater tendency to lose their mother by death before their 26th birthday than do the controls. This appears to be related to a highly significant excess of depressive patients who report that their mother died of cancer. There is no difference between depressives and controls as to the frequency of paternal death due to cancer. 9. It is suggested that medical and surgical out-patients may be a very suitable source of control material for this type of psychiatric investigation.

1. Findings have been presented on a consecutive series of 80 adopted children referred for psychiatric advice. 2. Only children accounted for a third of the sample, and less than half the remainder shared their adoptive status with another member of the family. 3. The proportion of adopted children in our hospital population (2.9 per cent.) is more than double the estimated frequency of adopted children in the general population. The rate of psychiatric referral increased with the approach and onset of puberty. 4. Inherent mental defect and severe mental illness were rare in the present sample. 5. Children brought up in professional class homes tended to be above average in their intellectual development, especially when placed in the first six months of life. Those brought up in working class homes fared less well irrespective of age at placement, but their overall level was only just short of average. 6. Adopted children were not found to differ from others in their symptoms except where they were placed after the age of six months, in which case they were more apt to steal and to destroy property. 7. Other factors besides early parental deprivation were invoked to account for these differences between children adopted before and after six months.

Early workers studying children because of persistent delinquency concluded that the child's inability to make relationships was the central core from which all other behaviour disturbances arose. The long term effects of institutionalization and repeated moves from foster mother to foster mother, it was asserted, were basic in any consideration of aetiology. The difficulty of treating these patients and the permanency of ill-effects was emphasized. In his well-known World Health Organization Bulletin, Bowlby (1951) concluded ‘on the basis of this varied evidence it appears that there is a very strong case indeed for believing that prolonged separation of a child from his mother (or mother substitute) during the first five years of life stands foremost amongst the causes of delinquent character development’. Whilst the practical conclusions of this publication led to a remarkable change in outlook and improvement in the institutional care of children, his theoretical conclusions have drawn heavy fire. Andry (1960) directed attention to the ‘defective role frequently played by the father and not only that of the all-too-often mentioned mother’. Wootton (1959, 1962) regards as an unproven hypothesis ‘that maternal deprivation leads to life-long damage and is a major factor in criminal behaviour’. She argues that Bowlby has overstated the case for the separation experience itself, without due regard to the conditions the child has come from or goes to, and has given scant recognition to hereditary factors. Wootton notes that relatively few investigations have traced the fortunes of the maternally deprived after adolescence, let alone throughout life, and hence there is no definitive proof that the damaging effects of the separation experience are irreversible. Further, the maternal separation hypothesis relates to only a minority of the delinquent population (the ‘affectless psychopath’) and there is no experience of the general population at large of comparable infantile experiences. A review of the recent literature (Lancet, 1966, British Medical Journal, 1967), indicates that various investigations into the long term effects of childhood parental deprivation and bereavement in the causation of adult mental ill health and behaviour disturbance have yielded inconclusive results. Whilst this state of affairs suggests that further studies are necessary to detect consistent patterns of parental deprivation, these patterns by themselves may not indicate precise modes of aetiology, but when taken into consideration with other objective data of family background may yield the development or refutation of hypotheses regarding various determinants of psychiatric disorder. In the light of these contemporary uncertainties we have re-examined the hypothesis that early adverse experiences are related to subsequent delinquency and criminality. By statistical procedures we examined two prison populations, one consisting of short term male first offenders of less serious crime, and the other of male recidivists and those convicted of serious crime. Various groups from the general population at large have been incorporated to act as the control group.