The Spirit of Social Service

We published in the previous issue the news of the convening of the "Conference of Social Studies on Delinquent Juveniles" in Cairo, between December 5 and 17 last, at which Lebanon was represented by Mrs. Alice Nakkash, president of the Union for the Protection of Juveniles, who delivered at the conference a statement in which she answered a number of questions that had been put to her.

In fulfillment of our promise, here we publish Mrs. Nakkash's statement, serially, in three installments, with renewed thanks to Mrs. Nakkash for favoring her magazine with this precise and important statement.

It is clear that social service which does not rest on spiritual foundations remains an inert body without life in it, and remains an inhuman endeavor. For social service is before all else a profession that must rest on a natural disposition to do good; it is the pressing desire to see right prevail, and the giving of love to all, that inspire a person to undertake social services.

Justice requires that every individual have his right, that every one have his chance, and that every one have his personality and his standing.

Every individual has a right

Every human being has the right to life, and the right that his family and kin should live a decent life; and the individual must not seek to profit from the misery and wretchedness of others. There is no doubt that to reform everything in the twinkling of an eye is impossible; the least we can do, then, is to study the subject of this misery and this wretchedness whose existence everyone acknowledges, and to apply thought and planning to the ways of combating it, without departing from those fundamental principles.

Every individual has his chance

Aid and assistance must be extended to capable workers and employees who wish to develop their personalities, by enabling them to pursue higher studies that will allow them to rise and advance to higher ranks. Everything must not be sacrificed for the sake of preserving rigid, antiquated administrative systems. For the method of pressing individuals into a narrow, confined circle and preventing them from advancing and rising is not the road that leads to order. Order is achieved, rather, when every individual is allowed to reach the level, and the degree of culture, for which his natural aptitude qualifies him, and in which his capacity, his native gifts, and all his faculties can unfold. And this is not merely the realization of the idea of justice; it is the sole means of attaining the best that can be hoped for from any establishment or any government department.

Every individual has his personality and his standing

This means that justice requires us to make it easy for every individual to obtain the esteem and respect that are his due.

Yet the sense of justice does not suffice, in itself, to bridge that gulf which separates the man of comfortable means from the destitute man. To it must be added love, which in the relations between individuals holds the place of the soul in the body. Every individual must be ready at all times to give and to bestow, of his money and of himself: giving when giving is possible, and bestowing all that can be bestowed of material and moral things. As for the giving of oneself, it means not holding back and withdrawing, but sharing with others in their joys and their sorrows, and knowing how to put oneself in another's place and how to listen to his complaint—indeed, how to spend one's time generously on everyone who is looking for a human being who will listen to his complaint and the misery of his wounds. A man must not meet his fellow man with the deaf language of the law or with rigid rules when he does not grasp the spirit of that law nor the aim of those rules. The complainant and the sufferer must be made to understand that in this age he can rise and advance if he sets about exerting effort with a gradualness that will not exhaust him. The aim of all must be directed not toward trying and condemning, but simply toward understanding and the exercise of thought. For judgment means, in reality, finding the outlets that lead to hope, not locking the door of mercy in the face of one who stands in need of it.

It has been proven that gain is assured in all forms of social activity when benefit is joined to the work. No work should be undertaken without the participation in it of those who benefit from it. Social work must be done with their cooperation—indeed, thanks to that cooperation whenever possible; they must share, to the widest extent feasible, in the work that is done for their sake. And it is clear that this whole system rests fundamentally on love, and on love alone. For the social spirit is nothing but a practical, daily application of the affection and the brotherhood that God has placed within us.

Now that we have attempted in this way to define what the "social spirit" is, we pass on to the study of "social service itself."

Part Two
Social Service

Social service—whether the body performing it be a private establishment, a municipal administration, a village center, or one of the juvenile courts, etc.—must, in keeping with the manifestations of advancement, progress, and civilization, always be in full accord with the individual and suited to his needs. An example of this: the movement of industrialization, despite the undeniable benefits it achieves—for it is a collective security for the individual wage-earning worker—by its very constitution leads to social consequences which tend to diminish, if not at times to disregard entirely, the human personality. For the individual is not, in himself, an economic unit through which progress is achieved; he is, rather, the object and the end of progress, whatever it may be. He is the sole and most important purpose for whose sake all technical, political, and legislative efforts must be devised and organized.

So it is, likewise, in the sphere of justice, and especially in the sphere of justice concerning juveniles. We have known for a long time how much truth and honesty there is in the well-known saying, "Perfect justice is perfect injustice." The best of intentions, when they are turned into deeds, always need to be examined and watched, so that they remain good intentions and are not transformed into their opposite.

Accordingly, "social service" may be defined, in keeping with its very name, as a civil or public system which undertakes, first, to uncover the defects that beset the fundamental structure of every community; and second, to contribute thereafter to the application of the laws and regulations ordering the life of that community in the most just and compassionate manner possible—whether by proposing the amendment of those laws and regulations, or by extending prompt and effective assistance in cases that very often appear hopeless.

This is the essential function of social service; and it is also, regrettably, the limit it cannot go beyond.

The immediate aim of social service

Having set forth this definition of social service, and in view of the origin from which it arose, we consider that its immediate aim is to extend suitable assistance to every individual within the sphere in which it operates—here, the sphere of the juvenile court. This method is known in America by the name (Cas work), the expression rendered in French as Méthode des cas individuels, that is, the method of studying individual cases. This system appeared for the first time in the United States, in the city of Chicago, in 1899, where the first juvenile courts were established. The system then developed greatly thereafter in that country, thanks to the efforts of Benjamin Lindsey, juvenile court judge in the city of Denver. The system afterward passed to all countries concerned with the realization of social justice; and the protection of childhood is considered the important element among the elements of that justice.

Social justice is regarded today as a veritable revolution against the antiquated notion that revolved around the idea of charity and good works. Its first manifestation was almsgiving; it then developed into the founding of asylums; and it passed, finally, to the formation of charitable associations.

As for the juvenile courts, the role of social service with respect to the case brought before the court is to present to the judge a study, which will be described later.

The method usually followed in these cases rests on the preparation of a general registry system (in the form of index cards), in which complete daily lists are recorded of the persons receiving assistance, with their names and addresses, as well as the names and addresses of the establishments that have intervened on their behalf. This system is completed by a table containing the names of the charitable establishments. The purpose of this system is the exchange of information in complete confidentiality.

The distant aim of social service

If social service plays the role of guiding the judge to the circumstances that worked to steer the young person toward crime, bringing him in the end to stand before the court, it does not consider its work complete if it neglects the reform of this small criminal and turns away from the task of preparing him for a sound life in the social milieu in which he lives. It is in this field that its productive function is concentrated, and that it finds the grounds of its loftiness and greatness; for its task is not confined to trying the juvenile, but extends to his reform and his treatment. Nor is this confined to bestowing care on the juvenile himself; it goes beyond him also to his family and to those who have charge of him. True sympathy—one of whose manifestations may at times be the extension of material aid, but which aims, more than that, at extending first assistance—is what helps social service to arrive at protecting a given family from falling into crime. This moral assistance helps to create a close and firm bond between social service, which takes the form of social aid, and the family in need of that assistance—a bond that turns into a friendship which in most cases lasts many years, until that family attains its economic and moral independence. This specialization in treatment, this attention to each case by itself, these individual material aids and particular forms of assistance, are what distinguish modern social service, in its essence, from the charitable establishments that preceded it by common consent.