ABSTRACT
The state usually is assigned primacy in sociological discussions of sanctioning. However, it is crucial to understand that the family also plays a major role in social sanctioning and that the state and the family are interrelated sanctioning systems. Donald Black's conception of violence as a form of social control is aptly applied to family violence against children, since violence against children within the family can itself be understood as a process of social sanctioning. The relationship between delinquency and adolescent homelessness is also uncertain. Past research on child abuse and homelessness has used data gathered from a variety of sources, ranging from agency registers of special populations of abused or runaway children to national surveys. Symbols used to represent these variables are presented in the first column of this table, followed by brief item descriptions and means and standard deviations for the unweighted combined sample and the separate street and school samples.
