Bowlby's Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves Study

In 1944 the psychiatrist John Bowlby published Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life, a study comparing forty-four children referred to a child guidance clinic for stealing against a comparison group of forty-four emotionally disturbed but non-thieving children from the same clinic, drawing on clinical interviews and case history data gathered from the children and their families. Bowlby found that seventeen of the forty-four thieves, compared with only two of the forty-four non-thieving comparison children, had experienced a prolonged early separation from their mothers before the age of five, and that fifteen of those seventeen separated thieving children displayed a pattern Bowlby termed affectionless psychopathy, marked by an apparent inability to form deep emotional relationships or feel guilt or remorse. Bowlby argued that prolonged early maternal separation was strongly associated with this affectionless character and with later delinquent behavior such as theft. The study became a founding piece of evidence for Bowlby's subsequent maternal deprivation hypothesis and, more broadly, for his influential theory of attachment, though its retrospective clinical methodology and small non-random sample have since drawn extensive methodological criticism.