A new report suggests that neighborhoods with strong families experience lower crime rates compared to areas with a high population of single-parent households.
The Illinois Policy Institute studied neighborhoods in and around Chicago; the center concluded that neighborhoods with more single-parent households average a 226% higher violent crime rate, and a 436% higher homicide rate, than nuclear family household-dominated neighborhoods, according to the Center Square.
The report found that “public safety is greater in communities where the two-parent family is the dominant norm,” according to the outlet, which is consistent with other studies linking fatherlessness to higher crime rates.
In fact, researchers at the Heritage Foundation found a “10 percent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes,” can lead to an astounding “17 percent increase in juvenile crime.” Additionally, the foundation found that neighborhoods characterized by high crime are also found to have “high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers.”
Critics of public policies that build up and strengthen the nuclear family tend to argue that housing in high-crime neighborhoods is often less expensive, which leads to a higher aggregation of single-parent homes solely due to the affordability of the location. However, the Heritage Foundation’s research found that “Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. By contrast only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime.” The findings highlight the importance of the stability provided to children and the surrounding community by the nuclear family unit.
The Institute for Family Studies event found that children who are raised in a nuclear family setting are not only less likely to commit crime, but they are also less likely to be the victim of a crime.
The institute wrote, “Young people are less likely to be victims of crime if they live in two-parent than in single-parent households. That has been a consistent finding of the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Policies and social fads that weaken the nuclear family threaten society as a whole by increasing crime, increasing dependence on government programs, increasing reliance on medications and drugs to treat a variety of mental health conditions, and decreasing the overall stability of communities.
