rship as a means of achieving.
“Gang Members” by Michael Morrissey is important for this research because it shows that youths who are gang members have joined because of seeking out needs that they never found available in their home environment. His research focuses on a 15 year old teen who was arrested for murder after stabbing a gang member rival more than 50 times. Morrissey discovered that the child was often beat, kicked and whipped with a belt by one of his relatives, behaviors that caused him to act out in an antisocial manner in school and eventually join a gang. However, Morrissey (1) contends that this is an all too common scenario for teens who participate in gangs, “The rough adolescence seems a typical start for a modern gangster’s life – an abusive or broken home that leaves teens hungering for respect, belonging and unconditional love.” These findings relate to the hypothesis that children from dysfunctional families are more likely to seek out the closeness and bonding they neglected to find at home in a source outside the family and/or school.
In “Dysfunctional Families”, Mimi Wickliff explains that dysfunctional families often warp the normal natural characteristics of a child. Primary care givers warp the natural characteristics of a child (being valuable, vulnerable, imperfect, dependent, and immature” in the dysfunctional families because these are used against the child, causing the child to find ways to survive by adopting behaviors and traits that lead to incomplete identity and personality formation. As Wickliff (1-2) argues, “The dysfunctional survival traits that their natural characteristics are warped into become the core symptoms of codependence when the
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