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 men-tally 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.