Motivations for Juvenile Offending Behaviour and Femicide

There is a general consensus that crime is disproportionately committed by young people. This is particularly pertinent in relation to femicide in two ways: the high rates of adolescent femicide (Coyne-Beasley et al., 2003) and the childhood histories of male perpetrators of femicide (Mathews et al., Br J Criminol 51(6): 960–977, 2011). Identifying and understanding the many factors which influence motivation is a dynamic and complex task and requires deep contextual analysis of the many variables which interact and transact in any given situation. This contextual analysis is critically important when considering motivations for juvenile offending, especially with regard to violent and relational crimes such as femicide, due to the very nature of young people, their developmental age and stage, their vulnerability, the nature of their relationships and relational dependencies, and the impact of their early life experiences. This chapter will adopt a cumulative ecological approach to understanding the relationship between motivation and behaviour in young people. Whilst acknowledging the interplay between motivating factors, this chapter collates the dominant motivating needs driving juvenile offending into three core categories, developmental life-course motivations, relational motivations, and socio-ecological motivations.