Juvenile Delinquents

There recently arrived in Lebanon Dr. Soren (SOREN), the specialist in psychology and in juvenile affairs. The United Nations has delegated her to travel through various countries and lecture on the subject of her specialty. She has made a tour of the Arab East as far as Iraq and Iran, and at Saint Joseph University she delivered a valuable lecture in French, which we wished to set before the lady readers of this magazine for their benefit; so we entrusted Mr. Salim Khoury with summarizing it and rendering it into Arabic.

Who is the young criminal? He is the minor who commits acts which the law counts as crimes, so that their perpetrator is brought before justice. But many youngsters commit crimes of this kind without the hand of justice reaching them, because their acts remain unknown, or because their families cover them up, and so these youngsters are not counted among the criminals. It is said that juvenile crime has increased in France; but this numerical increase may stem from skill in detecting it and tracking its traces in recent years, not from a real increase in numbers.

When a juvenile delinquent is arrested, the competent court subjects him to several examinations which may enable it to discover the origin of his behavioral ills and to treat him by effective methods. Among these examinations — varied in their aims and differing in their methods and objectives — are those that show the kind of ailment, whether it is mental or psychological or what; let us begin first with the psychological examination.

The psychological examination of intelligence enables the physician to know whether the juvenile is mentally retarded; that is, it shows whether the growth of the juvenile's mind lags relatively behind his real age. If we take as an example the 'Binet-Simon' method, which has been applied practically and scientifically to juveniles of various ages, we find that the mentally retarded child, or the feeble-minded one, is he whose mental age falls two or three years short of his bodily age. Here is the equation that enables us to measure the mental level, or the degree of intelligence:

Level of intelligence = mental age / real age
Q I = Age mental / Age réel

If the level of intelligence equals '1,' the child is counted normal; if it is less than '1,' he is counted retarded; and if it falls below 0.7, the child is truly feeble-minded.

But the learned researchers were not content with this scale; they wished to enter into the depths of the problem, and so they have offered us newer and more precise kinds of examinations, which uncover the causes of defects of character and point to the complex, or the complexes, that are the origin of the behavioral deviation.

The medical examination (the electrical tracing of the brain) points us to physiological deficiencies and, most often, to the trace of the disease of epilepsy. Likewise psychoanalysis and hypnotism, in certain cases not understood at first sight, show the motives and causes that lead to the commission of deviant acts. Truly, the physician and the psychologist — and above all the physician who is a psychologist — offer to justice and to the family very precious information.

The psychiatric physicians have found that many juvenile delinquents suffer from several diseases, mental, moral, and psychological, among them:

1 — Feeble-mindedness

Nearly thirty percent of juvenile delinquents — and forty percent if we add to them those who follow prostitution — suffer from feeble-mindedness. Feeble-mindedness aids crime, because the absence or deficiency of reason and the weakness of the moral will make it easy for the criminal to be led into his crime. The proof of this is that the feeble-minded are not gang leaders, but hangers-on or accomplices whom chance produced; these are the ones caught in a large store carrying goods that others stole before taking to their heels, while the feeble-minded one fell into the trap.

Feeble-mindedness opens the way for impulses and instincts to take an easy path toward committing many acts contrary to modesty and morals, aided in this by the feeble-minded person's inability to watch over himself and by the lack of growth of his moral and social sense; likewise the 'lack of aptitude' to which the feeble-minded resort — untaught and unqualified to practice any trade — makes them give themselves over to theft, pickpocketing, prostitution, and the like.

2 — Disorder of character

Disorder of character, or the inability to come to terms with one's environment, is harder to measure than feeble-mindedness. Nevertheless the last few years have registered great progress in this field, and have shown that those of disordered character among juvenile delinquents are more numerous than the feeble-minded. Dr. Debré and those schooled under him pointed to the disorder of character and described it as states of adjustment which we cannot act upon directly, saying: 'A man is born with his disorder of character as a man is born with blue eyes or black.'

But modern science has shown the error of this theory and its deficiencies: (1) The removal of the endocrine glands, or management with hormone extracts, has brought certain improvements to these essential constitutional problems. (2) Medical research has proved that certain epidemic diseases leave, in patients who recover from them, problems of character exactly similar to what Dr. Debré calls essential constitutional problems. (3) Psychosurgery, too, has proved that the excision of an abscess from the white matter of the brain has improved a patient's character. (4) And the new psychoanalysis has demonstrated that the disorder of character results from formal psychic complexes which are cured when psychoanalytic treatment can bring them out of their secret hiding place into the view of the conscious mind. This disorder, rooted in the course of a man's life, is most often closely connected with a feeling of bodily or social inferiority, or connected with some tale that the environment fixed in the youngster's mind. These problems, then, are not essentially constitutional, and they too can be cured.

To those of disordered character we must attach all the irresolute. This type is deceptive: the impulse in them is invisible, and cannot be brought under control. It fetters them 'like the bouts of malaria,' or like the disease of rheumatism; they are incapable of steadiness in any trade or in any work. You see them led along by their passing idleness, and then into theft, prostitution, and the like.

3 — The corrupt disposition

The other class are those of corrupt disposition, and these, fortunately, are the fewest in number among juvenile delinquents. These have been granted the smallest measure of the power of discernment. They cannot feel the value of any sentiment or of any moral or social argument. They know neither shame nor love nor pity nor kindness nor fear, and it is very hard to know how to influence them, or what one ought to do for them or with them.

4 — Excessive sensitivity

This type comprises persons who cannot bear social shocks, whether of the family or of the school; you see them run away if they sense the least possibility of mockery or reproach. Their fears are not illogical, like the fears of the irresolute, but their objects may be trivial and paltry. A pupil of this type does not dare present a low school mark to his parents, and so he takes to vagrancy, steals, and is led into prostitution. And we must not suppose that these fearful children are necessarily children who are not treated kindly in their homes or whom their families do not understand; for they are weak and defiant, as others are weak and lying. They cannot bear any strong emotion. And the least deviation from their surroundings is, in their eyes, a strong emotion.

5 — Compensation

There is a class of juvenile delinquents whose case we have not treated before: the 'compensating criminal.' Crime, in the eyes of these children or grown ones, is revenge for a harm they have endured. They often ignore themselves, but they do not forget a harsh experience, even if it befell them long ago. Their revenge is often not injurious. They do not, of their own choosing, speak of a harm that has touched them; it is for the physician or the psychologist to discover this harm. We shall give two examples of compensation:

(a) A boy of fifteen, haughty (a swaggerer), conceited, of a good family, had had early sexual experiences in Paris with prostitutes. When his father moved to Alsace, he took his son with him. The boy wanted to play, with the little peasant girls of the neighborhood, the role he had acted with the Parisian courtesans, but he failed miserably. One day he smashed the window of the town hall and tore up the notices and the marriage banns posted in the frame; then he went to the cemetery, tore off the wreaths, and defiled the graves. The village rose up in search of the perpetrator of these base deeds. A short time later the municipal authorities received anonymous letters which he had sent. The security forces set about searching for the criminal, in vain. It chanced that he once met one of the gendarmes and shouted mockingly in his face. The gendarme rebuked him and seized him, and after a little pressure he confessed, boastfully, to committing these offenses, and he was handed over to justice, which asked Dr. Soren to examine him. The first thing the physician thought of was that early recklessness might be the motive that had moved this boy — the more so after the flippant youngster put on a show of arrogance, saying: 'Those peasants deserve nothing more than the insult that struck their town hall

and their property!' And after a hypnotic analysis the adolescent boy awoke weeping: 'I have nothing to be proud of.' He confessed what lay in the depths of his depths: that he was graceless, ugly, that no girl would consent to marry him... and so on. Truly he suffered from contempt for himself: his short limbs disfigured his form, above all his two small hands! And one day a girl — beside whom he had walked, wishing to make himself a little lord to her — confronted him with the wounding truth: 'When one has a build like yours and looks like yours, one must not take oneself for a Don Juan!' There is no doubt that his early frequenting of the Parisian courtesans was an unconscious effort to compensate for his bodily constitutional deficiency.

In this example we find the 'spring,' or the coil, of the complex which those of disordered character confront.

(b) Dr. Soren cared for a boy of twelve in a home for the education of children who were victims of the war. The boy was hard to manage, and before long he was secretly heading, within the home, a gang of children who took to stealing bread and butter and selling them for a few piasters to the other boarding pupils. Not one of the little conspirators betrayed him; but at Christmas a considerable sum of money was discovered on him, and not one of his family had visited him or given him anything — where, then, had the money come from? And since the boy was known for ability and swagger, Dr. Soren invited him to meet with her.

At first he was insolent and arrogant; then he burst into tears and confessed all his sorrows and his misery. Why had his mother abandoned him when he was two years old? Was it because she realized that a deceitful husband had come back from the front, so that she deserted her marital home and carried off some of the furniture — even the toys of the child she left behind? Why had this mother done all this to him, to her son?

Dr. Soren began questioning the boy about his relations with the running of his father's new house. The divorce had come about without difficulty, and the father had quickly married again, and the boy had tasted torment and persecution of every hue. His presence in the house

cost expenses they could well do without. He was accused of ill will and hemmed in; so he rebelled, and was placed in an educational reformatory and utterly forsaken. No one came to visit him, his father did not write to him, and they sent him nothing. He compensated for this want and this personal deprivation, for his mother's forgetting of him and for his father's affection, by seizing a position of influence and power as gang leader in that institution; but the ever-open wound of his heart was: 'How could my mother — my mother — leave me!'

Through this window the physician was able to enter his rebellious heart. She showed him that his mother had suffered very, very much at parting from him. Her quarrel with his father was no concern of his, but she assured him that his mother deeply regretted abandoning him, and that she thought of him. And once the boy felt sure that he was not that creature cast out even from the goodness of parents and from a mother's tenderness, his relations with his companions and with the administration improved, and before long he came to trust Mrs. Soren and her love — the lady who played in his heart the part of the lost mother.

6 — Early insanity
Those stricken with early insanity are led naturally into crime without bearing responsibility for their acts. Medicine alone can treat them, and the hospitals for mental medicine await them.

7 — Defective social conditions
Some criminals show no signs of illness at all. Particular, distressing family or social conditions have led the child into the deviation of defiance or of crime, and medicine has nothing to do with them.

The method of fruitful work
What are the practical means that medicine employs to cure the sick of crime? We can overcome mental retardation by means of the glutamic acids. It has been shown in practice that those treated with them for a few months gained 'years in mental growth.' Likewise, eighty or ninety percent of the mentally retarded who are brought up in institutions that care for them leave the institution able to earn their own living. As for the sick of character (whom it is difficult to count among the sufferers of a single disease), they are left with their families, where their families manage their affairs.

As for the cases that are hard to cure, their patients are sent to educational reformatories supervised by the Ministry of Justice, into which none but criminals are admitted. In France, for example, there are places of proven usefulness, where the teaching is done by teachers who specialize in teaching the mentally retarded and the psychologically ill; and when one of these leaves the school, a special committee follows him, concerning itself with finding him places morally fitting for him and helping him not to sink again to the level at which he had stood. As for the prostitutes, they are placed in institutions that straighten their crookedness, where they are obliged to take up a manual trade or typewriting. Most of them succeed completely at the cleaning of clothes, and it is rare for one of them to fall into prostitution again. And when we recall that most prostitutes threw themselves into the arms of harlotry before their eighteenth year, we realize how much we must keep away from growing adolescents the favorable conditions that incite to these acts. Finally, the psychiatric hospitals admit the early liars.

The training of specialists
Some institutions admit young criminals among those who enter them and form of them the future teachers of the mentally retarded; and some institutions admit those who are specializing, so that they may test in practice what they have learned. Some of these specialists are often delegated to treat the problems of young criminals in judicial and technical matters.

And how we wish that some of our women and our men would lend this cause the importance it deserves, so that we might rear good citizens and lighten from our society and our country the woes of criminals who gnaw at the body of the nation — besides which, the conscious citizen feels a great responsibility toward his fellow citizen, and we are all brothers in humanity.