Emotions such as guilt and shame motivate us to keep our actions in line with normative expectations and are therefore essential in regulating our social and moral lives. Guilt, Shame and Juvenile Delinquency provides a compelling argument for the importance of considering guilt and shame as part of the etiological underpinnings of juvenile delinquency. It presents a comprehensive review of the criminological literature on the relationship between shame, guilt and offending, and it integrates both emotions into a symbolic interactionist theory of delinquency.. The book focuses in particular on the delinquency-inhibiting effects of forward-looking forms of guilt and shame, providing empirically-grounded insights into their gendered nature and social origins.

Guilt, Shame and Juvenile Delinquency will provide valuable insights not only for researchers working in the field of juvenile delinquency, but for all social scientists interested in the influence of guilt and shame on normative behaviour.

Author's information

Arne De Boeck studied at Ghent University, where he obtained his Master of Criminological Sciences in 2009. Afterwards he specialised in quantitative research methods at the University College Brussels. In 2011 he graduated summa cum laude as Master of Quantitative Analysis in the Social Sciences.

In 2013 he joined the Leuven Institute of Criminology, where he started working on a PhD about crime-related feelings of guilt and shame which he defended in 2022.