In "Preventing and Reducing Juvenile Delinquency," Howell proposes a female-specific pathway to serious, violent, and chronic offending. Incorporating ideas from feminist research about risk factors for female delinquency, he proposes five distinct and interrelated risk factors--child abuse victimization, mental health problems, running…

Studies identifying the mechanisms underlying the causes and consequences of antisocial behavior among female delinquents as they transit to adulthood are scarce and have important limitations: Most are based on official statistics, they typically are restricted to normative samples, and rarely do they gather prospective data from samples of…