Vicarious Liability

Running head: VICARIOUS LIABILITY

VICARIOUS LIABILITY 4

Vicarious Liability of Parents for Crimes Committed by their Children

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Introduction

Before this paper explains its perspective on vicarious liability of parents for crimes committed by their children, it is important to explain the meaning of vicarious liability. Vicarious liability refers to a senior party taking responsibility for an illegitimate action done by a junior individual. A junior is an individual who is below the age of 18 years. For instance in this case, a parent can offer to take responsibility for a crime committed by his or her child. Responsibility according to (Abadinsky, 2012), refers to a parent paying for the damages which have been caused by the child, whether the damage was through negligence or was intentional done. Currently, there are many cases of youth disobeying the law and this has led to more and more parents taking responsibility. This has been allowed because naturally, parents are charged with the responsibility of making sure that their children grow up to be responsible people in the society.

According to Giliker (2010),, in Rhodes, parents are expected to play their role amicably by training their children not to visit any gambling dens, taking alcohol, loitering around during late hours and other undesired behaviors. If they are found by the arms of the law parents are held responsible for their children’s’ actions. Therefore from this statement, it can be concluded that the criminal justice system is interested to promote responsible behavior right from home. Parents are held responsible probably because they have used poor methods in bringing up their children and this could be the reason why the child is indulging in unlawful behavior (Giliker, 2010).

By parents providing basic needs to their children, for example, food, clothing and shelter, they could also prevent their children from being caught in crimes like stealing and robbery. Children caught stealing in school should be interrogated amicably to find out why they committed that crime and determine if parents had a hand in it so that they could be held liable. Another example is when a child is caught driving the parent’s car without a license or reckless driving. This means that the child is putting many people at risk who are using the same road and is at risk as well. When such a car is caught, the owner of the car will be held liable for the damages as he or she was in a proper position to stop the crime from taking place (Gillam, 2010).

Parents are also in a good position to know if their children are exposed to participate in unlawful behavior. If a parent realizes this and does not do anything about it, that parent should be held responsible for the crime. In this case, the parent should be treated as an associate to the crime although he did not take part in it physically. To explain this, the parent is in a much better position to stop the crime but decided to ignore without exercising their natural authority on their children. Parents are supposed to bring up their children with skills to avoid immoral behavior (Abadinsky, 2012).

Conclusion

It is therefore undeniable that many youths out there are involved in unlawful behavior which can lead them into trouble with the law. For the criminal justice system to involve parents in the misbehaviors of their children, parents have no option but to train their children and bring them up responsibly so that they can avoid paying thousands of dollars and save their time in response to the crimes committed by their children (Gale Encyclopedia of Everyday Law, 2013).

References

Abadinsky, H. (2012). Organised crime. New York: Cengage Learning;.

Gale Encyclopedia of Everyday Law, 3rd Edition . (2013). NewYork: Gale Publishers.

Giliker, P. (2010). Vicarious Liability in Tort. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

Gillam, S. (2010). Law and Justice. NewYork: Ferguson Publishing Company.