UF study shows that risk of victimization increases with early puberty

January 30, 2006

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Adolescents who experience puberty earlier than their peers are more likely to be physically victimized through fights or offending behaviors such as bullying.

“There’s a lot of literature in psychology and especially in the social sciences that says that puberty can have some adverse effects,” said Alex Piquero, a University of Florida criminologist who co-authored the study with Dana L. Haynie, an Ohio State University sociologist. “The literature has shown that puberty can lead to more aggression, more offending, but it had never been linked to victimization.”

The study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, is the first to link puberty to victimization, primarily in the form of assaults and fights. Sexual victimization was not investigated as part of this study, but Piquero is researching its links to early puberty.

Piquero and Haynie sampled more than 10,000 adolescents, through the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a national sample also called the Add Health, which is one of the premier longitudinal studies of adolescents in the United States.

“It is the only data set that has information on puberty and victimization,” Piquero said.

The data provide a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7 through 12 from 132 randomly selected schools in the United States in 1995 and 1996. Piquero’s research limited their sample to adolescents aged 11 to 15, when most children reach puberty.

With this study, Piquero tracked children who had reached puberty in 1995 and looked at their victimization experiences a year later.

“It’s like collecting puberty information today, and then I called the kids up in a year and asked them what happened to them in the last 12 months,” Piquero said.

Puberty causes adolescents to start having different social experiences that increase their risks. It introduces dating, experiences with the opposite sex and interactions with people who are older, Piquero said.

“When someone undergoes puberty, they are going to start hanging out with different kinds of people, they are going to have different kinds of experiences and they are going to associate themselves with older people,” he said. “And that’s something, especially if they experience early puberty, that’s more of a risk factor than not.”

Parents should learn about the social changes their children are experiencing during puberty, Piquero said, and parents should encourage children to involve themselves in positive relationships and activities, rather than those that could put them at risk for becoming victims.

“It really is a challenge for parents to figure out how to keep their kids in environments that aren’t as risky,” said Julia Graber, a UF associate professor of developmental psychology, who was not a researcher in the study. “One of the things that we’ve found is that younger adolescents that start to associate with peers who look older really are at risk, and it’s very hard to control those social networks because kids may be seeking them out.”

Graber suggested that parents and teachers keep adolescents engaged in structured and productive activity, not necessarily just school and homework, but fun activities such as clubs, organizations, teams and sporting events. Such activities channel an interest in maturity and provide experiences away from parents while allowing children to be supervised.

“One thing that some studies show is that parents and teachers do seem to treat children differently based on their appearance, so even parents who know perfectly well how old their children are are inclined to start changing their regulations and how they interact with their children based on how they look,” Graber said.

Children also begin to view themselves as more mature as they experience puberty, and may fall victim to substance abuse and other activities marketed to teens, she said. As children seek activities to feel more mature, they will be drawn to older kids who are already engaging in risky behaviors.

“Scientists and worried parents know that when children pass puberty and become teenagers, they encounter a whole new world of opportunities to get into trouble with alcohol, drugs and delinquent acts,” said Terrie Moffitt, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. “Piquero and Haynie now turn the tables. He studied a nationwide sample of youngsters and found that puberty also brings our kids a new risk of becoming crime victims. Protecting teenagers may become a new nationwide agenda.”