Child’s gender influences crime rates in young fathers and their peers

Young criminal standing in handcuffs - The gender of a young father's firstborn child affects the likelihood of both him and his friends committing crime, a UCL-led study has found. For the first time, researchers established that young fathers who have a firstborn son rather than a daughter are convicted of fewer crimes in subsequent years, and crucially that this reduction also leads to a drop in criminal convictions among peers living in the same neighbourhood. The study, conducted by Professor Christian Dustmann from UCL Economics and Rasmus Landersø from the Rockwool Foundation and published in the Journal of Political Economy , provides the first empirical evidence of "multiplier" effects in criminal behaviour - in which an initial crime subsequently leads to additional crimes, which go on to cause even more. The presence of multipliers has important consequences for crime prevention policies, as preventing someone from becoming a criminal may have beneficial effects far beyond the impact of the reduction of a single person's crime rates. Researchers analysed several decades of crime registers and administrative data from Denmark, focusing on men who became first-time fathers between the ages of 15 and 20 - an age range in which crime rates peak. They measured convictions or charges for crimes committed in the years after the child's birth and found substantial differences for those men who fathered a son rather than a daughter. While there are no differences in young fathers' crime rates before their child is born, the researchers found that the probability of being convicted of a crime is about 17% lower for fathers of boys than girls in the first year after the child's birth.