There are two main explanations on crime based on the theories of nature and nurture. First of all, there is Bandura’s social learning theory. The social learning theory (1997) states that behaviour is learned from the environment though the process of observational learning. Children observe the people around them behaving in various ways. This was experimented with the ‘bobo dolls’. Individuals that are observed are called models. In society children are surrounded by many influential models such as parents within the family, characters on television programs, friends within their peer group and teachers at school. These models provide examples of masculine behaviour to observe and feminine behaviour you observe and imitate. They pay attention to some of these models and encode their behaviour at a later time they have observed. They may do this regardless whether the behaviour is ‘gender appropriate’ or not but there are a number of processes that make it more likely that a child will reproduce the behaviour that its society deems to the appropriate for its sex.
John Bowlby (1907-1990) was a Psychologist form England who believed that mental health and behavioural problems could originate from early childhood. Bowlby’s ‘Theory of attachment’ suggests that earliest bonds formed by children with their parents/ whoever is looking after them, have a high impact that determinds trhem throughout life. Bowlby believed that attachment behaviours are instinctive and will be activated by any conditions that seem to threaten the achievement of proximity, such as separation, insecurity and fear. He also postulated that the fear of strangers represents an important survival mechanism, built in by nature. Babies are born with the