Deviant Behaviors

A detailed Summary of Deviant Behaviors

A person would be considered to be acting deviantly in society if they are violating what the significant social norm in that particular culture is. What causes humans to act certain ways is a disputed topic among researchers for some time now. There are three types of research that have tried to answer this question. There is the psychological answer, biological answer, and the sociological answer. With all of the studies that have been performed, no one group has come up with an exact reason to why people behave deviantly. Although, sociologists' theories have not been disproved as often as the psychologists' and biologists' theories because their experiments are too hard to define and no one definition for deviance is agreed upon by all experimenters (Pfuhl, 40).

My own curiosity to find out what the influences are behind deviant behavior is the purpose for this paper. We have already discussed this topic during class in chapter six of the textbook that explains deviance and crime. This section talks more about deviance being a learned behavior. I wanted to find out more information to see if biological factors are also behind this kind of behavior. The most knowledge acquired for why people act deviantly is from the sociolo

e that psychiatric support is needed. The psychological answer for deviance is the relationship between crime and mental defectiveness.

Rather than concern with behavior from certain people, sociologists view deviance as a behavior engaged in a person by having a common socioculture or the same experiences within a culture. Edwin H. Sutherland explains that deviant and non-deviant behaviors are learned in the same ways through his Differential Association Theory. Sutherland demonstrates that criminal behavior is learned from intimate groups by the means of communication. When they learn how to act deviantly they then know what is involved in what drives a person to commit a crime. This does vary in people who have different characteristics in concerns of how much a person will learn if they learn anything at all. This is the most popular among sociological theories because it has not yet been disproved. This is due to the enormity and difficulty measuring differential associations in one with criminal or non-criminal patterns. Whatever the cause is for deviant behavior is, it is still a problem in society. Alt!

The legal definition of abuse and neglect vary from state to state but does, in any form, create serious consequences for behavior. It occurs in patterns and not just once, which causes stress, poor self-esteem, aggressiveness, lack of empathy, and fewer interactions with peers. Child abuse is any physical or emotional trauma to a child for which no reasonable explanation is found. Neglect refers to the deprivation that children suffer at the hands of parents (Deviance 1). Such components that comply with these definitions are non-accidental physical injury and neglect, emotional abuse or neglect, sexual abuse, and abandonment. Over one million of the youth in America are subjected to abuse a year. In terms of sexual abuse one in ten abused are boys and one in three of them are girls. It is really unknown how many cases go unreported in any area of abuse or neglect a year. From 1980 to 1986 reported cases did go up sixty percent.

gical perspective. There is need for more research, if possible, in the psychological and biological perspectives, but there is a lot more known in the sociological viewpoint. The reality that everyone considers the definition of deviant behavior different makes it complicated and unknown if a truly accurate answer can ever be found (Pfuhl 18). This is why this topic is important to the study of sociology. Sociologists have more information, and therefore may be closer to finding the cause.

feel they are good enough to belong in the realms of society. Delinquency is when a child acts out their hostility towards the parent or abuser in a deviant manner (Lemert 59). Parents need to correctly punish their child when they see deviant behavior and give them love, but the problem is that some parents do not see it.

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Approximate Word count = 2380
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

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