"Every one of us, or most of us generally speaking, can — by what the social body, or the environment in which we live, stamps upon him." "Siji" expressed this best some fifty years ago when he said: "The things of the spirit are themselves things bound to the body."
If we carried all these truths over to the scale of an individual case, we would find them plain in the plea recently made by the lawyer Maître Baudet, when he pleaded, on the 21st of last November, for the young student Pauline Dubuisson, aged twenty-two springs, at her trial on the charge of killing her lover. This lawyer succeeded in saving the accused woman's life and sparing her the death sentence thanks to those arguments which he summed up at the close of his plea, and which we give here in their own words. He said: "I ask of you, on her behalf, pardon for her. Pardon for her, for the sake of all those fathers who beget children and believe they are raising those children well, while they leave behind of them nothing but creatures in their own image; pardon for the sake of those fathers who give life to their children and then pass close beside them without seeing them."
From this it is clear that in the matter of crime we must not content ourselves with enacting laws, however precise and perfect those laws may be. Without social service organized according to the principles we have set out, we shall obtain nothing but punishments imposed and hardened criminals turned out by the prisons. For the law, by virtue of its function, has a general character, while the aim we seek to achieve through social prevention requires us to work to protect all criminals, to reform them, and to fit them for an honorable life; for they are in fact victims before they are criminals.
In 1940 the Union for
the Protection of Juveniles in Lebanon asked the Ministry of Justice to work for the creation of a special bureau for the affairs of juvenile criminals. The Union obtained the fulfillment of this request in 1944. It then asked for the creation of an institute of reform and education, and obtained it in 1947. Finally it asked for the creation of a juvenile court, and obtained it in 1948. The Union carries on social service among the criminals while they serve their sentences and afterward. The employees who performed this work for it were at first drawn from among nurses and visitors; today they are women social specialists holding a license for this kind of work from the Lebanese School of Social Training. This school was founded in the month of September 1949, and it has lately been able to prepare the necessary number of social specialists, of whom the country's need grows greater every day. You will find, ladies and gentlemen, among the papers of this study, the detailed program of the instruction given by this institute. And it is my duty to point to the efforts being made by the Ministry of Social Affairs, with the assistance of the United Nations, to establish a center for the theoretical and practical preparation of the official social specialists and the assistants. We hope this center will begin its activity as soon as possible, so that we may have available the full number of these assistants, upon whose shoulders rests the foundation of all the social services.
A republican decree was recently issued restricting the title of official woman social specialist to the graduates of the Lebanese School of Social Service alone. We look to the social center, and especially to the Ministry of Social Affairs, for continuous work to complete this beginning
and to establish this system firmly, and especially for work to define the competences of the social specialists. Perhaps the time is near when we shall see all the charitable associations, the great concerns, and the public administrations concerned confine the granting of the posts of women social specialists, from among those engaged in social questions, to those women who fulfill the conditions laid down in this system.
The Social Inquiry
Since social service has been organized in the manner we have seen, the role of the women social investigators begins before the judge from the moment the preparation of the inquiry is entrusted to them.
This inquiry must supply the judge with precise and objective elements concerning information on the cases he is called upon to examine, and to which the juvenile's welfare is bound.
The woman social investigator makes the acquaintance of her small client for the first time at the police station when he is arrested; then she goes in his company before the examining magistrate,
Trinal
Used for washing clothes, scouring kitchen utensils, and cleaning floors, walls, doors, windows, tiles, bathrooms, washbasins, and lavatories.
Trinal does not harm the hands and does not damage clothes.