ADVERTISEMENTS:
In this essay we will discuss about the patterns of delinquency. After reading this essay you will learn about:- 1. Introduction to Delinquency 2. Meaning of Delinquency 3. Patterns of Delinquency 4. Factors Affecting Delinquency 5. Helping the Young Delinquent.
Contents:
- Essay on the Introduction to Delinquency
- Essay on the Meaning of Delinquency
- Essay on the Patterns of Delinquency
- Essay on the Factors Affecting Delinquency
- Essay on the Helping the Young Delinquent
1. Essay on the Introduction to Delinquency:
He is a child, who, not finding in his environment, food and opportunities for normal growth and development, reacts to his situation in aggressive ways that irritates us adults. Moreover, lie tends to be the adolescent boy who belongs to a minority race, comes from a broken family is poor and is not a church goer or a member of an organisation like the scouts.” —Henry B. Nelson
A ten year old, puny, thin, innocent looking boy, clad in tattered clothes, was brought to the Child Guidance Clinic, by his worried father, for advice, treatment or institutionalization, if possible. ‘The boy, the father reported, was quite intelligent, but had no interest in studies. He ran away from the school almost daily and roamed about the streets aimlessly, bare-headed and barefooted.
He entered other people’s houses, under suspicious circumstances, and stole money or articles which he could carry in his small hands or pockets. More often, he would sell these articles for a paltry sum of money in the bazar to petty shop-keepers. With the money that the obtained in these transactions he would buy sweets or toys which he generally distributed among his friends.
At times, the father added, he would pick-pocket in a crowd, steel money from his bushshirt or coat or mother’s purse or break open that trunk that contained valuable articles. He used abusive language and beat his siblings when at home and became a nuisance in every possible manner.’
“The child was carrying on these nefarious activities for the last three years. He was scolded, punished and mercilessly beaten but without any effect. He had been apprehended by the police a couple of times but let off with a warning.”
“I have come to know only recently”, another father said apologetically, “that my youngest son who is 14 years old has not attended the school regularly for the last one year. He has been squandering the fees which he should have paid to the school authorities. He has been a brilliant student, but lately has lost all interest in studies.
Trashy novels, sexy stories, love-songs of films, cheap cinema pictures interest him more than anything else now. He often steals money; smokes like a chimney, gambles a lot and remains away from the home for days together. What a shame and humiliation he has brought the family! If ever he is checked and criticised for what he does, he gets highly agitated and irritated, creates a scene in the home; cries, howls and threatens to kill himself and the members of his family.
“I understand he has a number of boy-friends coming from very low families. He spends most of his time in their company, and possibly, he is exploited by them. I apprehend, they have seduced him to acts of sodomy as well. Once upon, a time, he was known to be the healthiest and neatest in his family. There used to be a glitter in his eyes-the glitter of intellectual curiosity. His condition now is deplorable. He has ceased to look after himself. His hair are disheveled, his clothes are dirty, torn and smelly. The police caught him once in a park where he was with a gang of boys older than himself. The gang was planning to do some-mischief. Perhaps, they were planning to molest a couple of girls passing in the locality.”
These and many others are examples of children who are known as “young delinquents” “children who are guilty of offences like stealing, burglary, violence, varancy, gambling, sexual offences, pick-pocketing and other antisocial behaviour calling for official action and legal procedure, as the case of adult who are punished by law, if they commit such crimes.” These juvenile delinquents, however, constitute a small proportion of the total population of criminal children, as many of them are never caught or having been apprehended they are still not produced in the court.
The problem of juvenile delinquency—expressing itself in all kinds of anti-social attitudes or patterns of adjustment that deviate from the code of conduct the society is attempting to enforce, or in behaviour patterns that amount to violations of norms of conduct on the part of children – has been on the increase during the last two decades. Because of its adverse effects on society, it has become an acute social problem.
This is borne out by Sabnis in a report on Juvenile Delinquency in India. “In the beginning every problem is individual and affects individuals only. But when its effect is a considerable section of the population and threatens the value system cherished by the community as a whole, the value system which is really an amalgam of traditions, usages, practices, beliefs and faith then that problem may be said to have assumed a distinctive configuration of a social problem calling for social action to ameliorate or eliminate it in the interest of the community.”
2. Essay on the Meaning of Delinquency:
Before we analyse the causes of these anti-social reactions and offences, it will be pertinent here to understand the various implications of the term ‘delinquency.’ As hinted above, juvenile delinquency may be defined as a social offence committed by a young person, below the age of eighteen, for a number of times which if committed by an adult, would be considered and punished as a crime.
This is the legal concept of delinquency. From the socio- cultural point of view, it is a pattern of adjustment that deviates from the code of conduct society is attempting to enforce. In other words, it amounts to violations of ‘conduct norms’. Psychologically considered, delinquency is not a distinct entity, but rather one form of emotional disturbance. It is built out of conflict, and it is intended to serve as a way of meeting or covering up a problem. Its motivation is generally unconscious.
A delinquent is essentially a maladjusted person who creates difficulties for others and who is himself blocked in his own wholesome growth. He rebels and aggresses against authority and tries to destroy, break down or change the environment. It must be noted that he is not a unique type of human being. His heart cherishes the same human desires and natural yearnings as fill the heart of a nondinquent.
He has the same abundance of humanity and eagerness to respond to decent treatment of others as any other human individual. But he puts on sort of cloak, called the antisocial behaviour or delinquency, as a protest against social treatment method out to him. He is hostile and rebellious against parents, teachers or social organisations “which fail him in the satisfaction of his fundamental human urges and needs.” He as it were, rebels to protect his own integrity, and attacks the situation which threatens his security and the urge to exist and grow.
Delinquency is regarded as a form of social disorganisation. It is being increasingly realised by socialogists, social workers in child welfare, that social conditions that obtain in the process of increasing urbanization in our country, have affected the family pattern to a great extent, resulting in an atmosphere that is congenial to the growth of this problem which is a form of social disorganisation.
As a consequence of the unplanned industrialisation followed necessarily by urbanisation, young men and women have been migrating to cities and towns loosening themselves from the emotional support they had been getting from their families and communities.
The joint family system and the compact self-sufficient pattern of the traditional Indian village offered a kind of automatic check on the growth of delinquency because of this emotionally-toned socio-economic support in the past; and consequently and by and large, the problem was not of the same proportions and dimensions in earlier days, as it has come to be now.
3. Essay on the Patterns of Delinquency:
Delinquent children may roughly fall into two distinct groups. One group consists of delinquents who are active, restless, hyperactive, energetic and uninhibited. They generally have a strong spirit of adventure, and love to roam about and seek excitement. They seem to be always ‘on the go’.
Their behaviour tends to be dangerously disruptive. Then there are delinquents, forming the second group, who are generally shy, quiet, vindictive and highly selfish. They lack in feelings of shame or guilt, and have no consideration for or thought of others.
Most delinquents belonging to both groups, driven as they are by primitive impulses which they want to fulfill immediately, ignore their responsibilities, restrictions and duties. They have no stable goals. Their life is so much dominated by fleeting desires that they have no time left for farsighted planning.
It will be interesting to note the patterns of delinquency as found by various research workers in the field. These juvenile offences are of varied types. They include offences against property including stealing, burglary and arson, murder and suicide, gambling, assault and rape, sodomy, ticketless travelling, placing stones on the railway lines and throwing stones at the passing trains, offences against prohibition and rationing rules, drunkenness, wandering, frequenting the company of thieves or prostitutes, living in houses of defame, breach of supervision order, sex offences, licenseless hawking, illegal tress-passing etc.
Of these offences, the largest percentage is that of offences against property. Spelling out these offences in details, one finds a large variety of them.
An interesting feature of the pattern is the age-group of offenders. We find the largest number of offenders falls in the age group between 14 and 16 and the next largest group consists of juveniles between 11 and 13. The reason is that children up to 10 or 11 or younger find pleasures in the home and like to spend more time there, but with the onset of puberty, at 14 or 15, they make, more social contacts and develop a wider range of interests.
This leads them to more outside than inside the home which in most cases, is not an adequate one. Again at this age, there are more chances of frustration than at an earlier age. The growing adolescent would like to be treated like an adult, with his own individuality, new beliefs and outlook, but more often, he is denied the adult status, and is not given the due recognition.
His desires for emancipation from dependency of childhood are thwarted. Thus frustrated, he becomes a victim of conflicts, both conscious and endopsychic, which lead to aggression, rebellion and other anti-social acts. The growing physical strength and independence also helps in this direction.
What about the sex-ratio in this pattern? The general trend everywhere is for more boys than girls to commit offences. More girls are involved in the crime rather than commit it. This is true of Western countries as much as in India. In our country, however, the ratio between boys and girls is much higher (6:1) than in other countries: this can be explained in terms of the socio-cultural factors i. e., the role of ‘girls’, the greater mobility of boys outside the home.
Even the socialisation process, as it prevails in our homes, expects a certain amount of prankishness and misbehaviour among boys. Delinquency among girls is more often the expression of personal inadequacies rather than a manifestation of social or culture of imperatives.
The majority of girls will not engage in delinquent activities unless emotionally disturbed to begin with, whereas boys will do so under pressure of culture and environment. Despite this, one can see that there are more sex-delinquents among girls than among boys, just as there are more thief’s among boys than among girls. This could be, perhaps, explained, because girls attain sex-maturity at an early age and the biological factor in sex-attraction may explain in part the tendency towards sex-offences on the part of girls. Other factors could be exploitation of girls and economic poverty.
The complex pattern of juvenile delinquency has also shown a positive correlation between offence and low educational level of offenders.
4. Essay on the Factors Affecting Delinquency:
Once upon a time, it was thought that the delinquents were born, so that delinquency was innate or inherited. For example, it was assumed that the delinquents were born devoid of ‘Moral Sense’, which made them absolutely irreformable. But various studies made in Western Countries have shown that there is no scientific basis for thinking that the delinquency is inherited.
Another particularistic approach held that the delinquents were mental defectives. Lombroso, for example, held that the delinquent had defective intelligence. This theory has been found untenable in the light of large-scale investigations made by Healy, Burt, Bronner and many others.
They on the other hand, have shown that all delinquents cannot be labelled as ‘mental defectives’ and that there are many who possess superior mental ability. Most of the delinquents have been found to fall within the range of average or just below-the-average intelligence. That there is a direct relationship between defective intelligence and delinquency has been, thus, denied by almost all the investigation conducted in various countries.
The evidence gathered so far goes to impress on us the truth that delinquency is a phenomenon of multiple causations. It is the result of various factors interacting on each other. These factors may be classified as biological, psychological, social-cultural, personal and others.
(1) Biological Factors:
The biological causes lend a considerable significance to physiology in the study of delinquency. It is being recognised that biological factors, varying from one individual to another may themselves be primarily responsible for initiating or intensifying (as well as inhibiting or diminishing) affective states and the resultant delinquent conduct.
The biological causes include the inborn mental defect or deficiency; endocrine imbalances, constitutional defects such as deafness, blindness causing delinquent subjective responses, organic psychoses and brain-injuries resulting in the loss of inhibition or control over behaviour.
(2) Personal Factors:
Among the personal factors which have been found conducive to delinquency are temperamental instability, poor health, short or too big stature or some physical defects which may give rise to feelings of inferiority. These, in turn, may dispose one to more aggression, bravado or antisocial behaviour as a compensatory reaction for his inadequacies. “Premature puberty may provide a basis for sexual offences, as there is lack of harmony and mental disturbance due to the sudden and early arousal of sexual impulses.”
(3) Psychological Factors:
The psychological conditions which appear to be significant as etiological factors are the neurotic reactions, the psychopathic behaviour patterns, the functional psychotic conditions and general emotional disturbances and frustrations. The neurotic delinquent, is usually the product of “an atmosphere of over-rigid parental restraint, of overprotection and over-restriction, frequently or perfectionism and inconsistency.”
In such an atmosphere, the child’s ‘ego’ or ‘self remains weak. It lacks the strength to sublimate his impulses into socially acceptable channels. It is chiefly governed by the ‘pleasure principle’ or the momentary pleasure-seeking impulses.
The weakness of the ‘ego’ is accentuated by the weakness of the ‘Super-ego’- as no identification with weak or over-rigid parents has taken place. Thus the delinquent finding no checking force outside and having none within himself (weak- ego) is driven to commit the offences.
“The psychopathic delinquent is generally deficient in inhibition through the absence or an effective coherent super-ego.” He is highly aggressive, cruel, defiant, egocentric, suspicious, unfriendly, vindictive and primitive. He may show an utter lack of capacity for sympathy or consideration for others. “He is an unwanted child, unloved, consistently rejected; his response is uninhibited hostility and overt aggression. In the absence of sympathetic relationships the psychopath fail to develop a conscience or a capacity for warmth.”
Various studies have shown that functional psychoses of various types may also lead the adolescent and the youth to a wide variety of delinquencies. Of these functional psychoses, schizophrenia is quite significant as an etiological factor. The schizophrenic adolescent or youth tends to be socially unadjusted, withdrawn and disorganised in his intellectual, emotional and volitional functioning.
He does poor work at school and is very deficient in his personal relationships. As he lacks emotional stability, or integration and had diminished self-control, he may commit a number of delinquencies. Similarly, the paranoid adolescent, with suspicious and ego -centred personality, may be led to aggressive offences.
The most important psychological factor is the emotional responses of the individual to experiences and situations in the home and at school which thwart his basic need in his personality. ‘Emotional insecurity feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, affectional under-nourishment, extreme submissive or aggressive responses to rigid domination – these are among the common denominators not only of personal maladjustment but behavioural disorder and delinquency as well. “For example, lack of affection and security easily lead to sexual delinquency, to theft, and incorrigible behaviour in children.”
(4) Environmental Factors:
Among the environmental causes may be mentioned the poverty and unemployment at home, defective family relationships such as domination by one parent, ineffectuality of one parent, clashes between father and mother, favoritism provoking jealousy, parental over solicitude or neglect and rejection of the child.
The home may present conditions which generally characterise a broken home such as death of parents, desertion, divorce, or conditions which typify a vicious home such as cruelty, drunkenness, immorality, exploitation and gambling indulged in by parents.
Recently, it is being increasingly felt that the size of family has some bearing on delinquency, although research has shown no significant difference in the size of the households of the delinquents and non-delinquents.
“But the offshoots of “uncontrolled” procreation, in the words of Mrs. Kanta Khipple resulting in economic strain on parents, unhygienic overcrowding in the apartments, confusion of a large family where individualities are drowned would obviously affect the mind of the child. Children are prone to develop behaviour problems in a home where the mother is always ailing because of the endless succession of pregnancies and fails to give motherly affection and care to those already born; or where the father comes jittery and with frayed nerves because of the economic impasse in which he finds himself on account of the too many mouths to be fed.”
Bad neighbourhood or bad institutions which endanger morals, lack of wholesome leisure time activities and healthy recreation and unfavourable school conditions may be another set of causes specially outside the home.
Among the unfavourable school conditions may be particularly mentioned harsh, dictatorial, unsympathetic and impatient teachers who often indulge in slurring, taunting and cutting remarks and who thus reinforce the emotional damage done to the child at home, and rigid discipline which cares for the observance of rules rather than the reactions of children, inflexibility of curriculum, paucity of adequate co-curricular activities, collective teaching methods and pervasive atmosphere of severe competition—that deflates the ego building capacities of children who are backward and slow.
(5) Socio-Cultural Factors:
The socio-cultural influences which form a part of the child’s environment are marked by sudden shifts of social values, and host of irreconcilable and changing group expectancies. The family, the religion, the society and the states demand different types of behaviour patterns. There are inconsistencies in these demands. This confuses the child and makes an integrated adaptiveness rather difficult, Egoism, motives of personal aggrandisement and general repugnance to authority are encouraged in such a cultural set-up.
A point of view that is at once thought provoking and refreshing, as far as etiology or delinquency is concerned, is presented by Professor Albert K. Cohen. He believes that delinquency is a persistent adolescent sub-culture that has become traditional in certain neighbourhoods of big cities, for example, in Bombay, Kolkata and Varanasi.
This sub-culture is encouraged by growing- up in a class-system. The working class male child lives in a society where everything is measured by middle class firms and standards. He has to suffer deprivations and frustrations of various types. His family has no status, the job which his parents hold enjoys no prestige, the school where he studies discriminates against him and reminds him of his lower position.
Thus problems of adjustment are created, for the working class boy finds himself at the bottom of the status hierarchy when he moves in a middle class world of adults and children. But he must solve his problems. This solution, he finds by identifying himself with the delinquent sub-culture which legitimizes and sanctions his aggression and hostility, his disdain of middle class norms and standards of behaviour.
5. Essay on the Helping the Young Delinquent:
1. Importance of Prevention:
Whatever the causes-biological, psychological or environmental—the fact remains that the problem of prevention of delinquency, although very difficult is one of paramount importance. We know that treatment of already established antisocial behaviour is long, tedious, expensive and not always successful because of the complexity of causes. Again, treatment alone will not materially decrease the incidence of delinquency.
Hence, preventive measures are urgently needed. It is true that even the most scientific scheme for the prevention of juvenile crime will not succeed in altogether abolishing it, “but it will prevent, it from spreading in the same way, as preventive medicine has succeeded in substantially, decreasing the frequency of large epidemics, though it cannot prevent the sporadic incidence of infectious diseases.”
As delinquency is an acute social problem, its effective prevention is very much bound with large scale changes and transformations in our social and cultural conditions and requires the improvement of all the major social services directed towards child welfare.
2. Some Preventive Measures:
In advanced countries of the West, where a lot of research leading to the establishment of sound facts of crime causation has been done, many concrete preventive measures have been suggested in accordance with the causes of delinquency. It is believed, For example, that a juvenile delinquency is due to the lack of religious influence, broken homes, poverty, parental neglect, cheap commercialized recreation, comics, mystery stories, radio and television thrillers, sex-stimulating movies, excessive mobility of population, illiteracy, malnutrition glandular imbalance, feeblemindedness and others. Hence, myriad schemes for prevention have been proposed.
These include the prohibition of intoxicating drinks and of joke-box machines, the control of movies and radio, the abolition of comics, prosecution of parents of delinquent boys and girls, legislation requiring the sterilisation of hopeless idiots and imbeciles and limiting immigration of the foreign- born.
In India, where not much research has been done on the causation of delinquency, suggesting concrete preventive measures may be a little presumptuous or risky. Yet, in view of the many researches made elsewhere and in the light of an examination of our socio-cultural conditions as they emerge against a background of “rapid strides of industrialisation and urbanisation”, we can venture a few preventive approaches.
3. Favourable Socio-Economic Conditions:
Most researches in the causation of delinquency have brought out the importance of the environmental factors in anti-social behaviour in all cases except those where there is an organic disturbance. Even the material brought to light by the psycho-analytical investigation of individual cases has made clear in what intricate ways environmental factors can bring about disturbances in mental development resulting in anti-social behaviour.
It is necessary that such external conditions as will allow the parents to bring up their children in a satisfactory way, are created. This implies good economic and housing conditions, a comprehensive health service and the abolition of unemployment. This is possible only with planned socio-economic regeneration on a broad scale. It must, however, be noted that “it is not economic poverty in isolation, but a Gestalt of factors existing among a minority of the poor that leads them into trouble, inadequacy in homes, education, moral training, associations and recreations.”
One of the most important preventive measures is the improvement of the family life. The home-frontier must be guarded. It is clear that if there is to be any really effective reduction in the violation of law in the society, “it can come only through the medium of the family, since it is there that the attitudes and conduct are bred out of which anti-social lives develop.” Young parents need to be prepared and educated for adequate motherhood and fatherhood.
They need to be trained for dealing with children of various age-groups, and their problems. They have to realise that a well-adjusted home, where there is a solid bond of affection between the parents and children, where children’s needs are appreciated judiciously met, where discipline is consistent and firm-based not on force and coercion but on willing acceptance of authority arising from affection, regard and admiration for the parents, will produce well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens.
Much of it can be achieved through courses in parenthood and programmes of ante-natal clinics, day nurseries and child guidance clinics. All those programmes and courses should lay emphasis on understanding of the needs of children in accordance with their development. In the words of Friedlander, the parental education “should give the mother some idea of the emotional needs of the child, with special emphasis on the necessity, for an uninterrupted relationship between mother and child, the normality of the appearance of certain anti-social or perverse instinctive urges at the various age levels and the slowness with which such impulses tend to disappear.”
The family life seems to suffer if the mother has to go out and earn. But in the present-day economic set-up, some mothers will go out to earn. Hence, social conditions will have to be made such as to enable her to remain with her children as long as she can. The cares and responsibilities of the working mother will have to be lightened through social case work.
This indicates the significance of effective family case work and family counselling as a means to improved family life through assisting individuals and family units. Psychiatric social workers will contribute greatly to the improvement of family life by working with mothers individually mothers who have difficulties in accepting their roles, or who have difficulties in their child caring attitude and care. Such mothers, if helped in time, through psychiatric social work, will be able to lavish on their children unwavering affection that will foster the growth of a normal ego and super-ego in the child.
4. Adequate Schooling:
The school comes next to home in having the most strategic positions in the community because of the close and continuous contact with the child. An attempt should be made to make the first grades of the school an extension of the home with the same atmosphere of informality and freedom which characterises a good home, so that the abrupt change of atmosphere may not upset the mental balance of the child and may not cause a feeling of insecurity damaging mental health.
There is a need for sympathetic, patient and understanding teachers, flexible and broad-based curriculum and a large variety of co–curricular activities, suiting individual needs and interests, a cooperative atmosphere in the class-room, provision of facilities for educating the dull, the defective and the gifted, and an emotional climate of trust and good-will in which the personality of the child flourishes. An effective parent-teacher cooperation through parent-teachers associations, and a system of “visiting teachers” should help the school to perform its duties of character-building and educational guidance of children. All these conditions will help the school to stem the rising tide of juvenile delinquency.
Various studies on the role of the school in preventing delinquency impress on us the truth that the most important factor in the school is the teacher who is ready to act constructively in the classroom. Such a teacher, it is said, will provide children with a variety of experiences and will understand each child’s capacities and help him to recognise and develop his abilities – social, emotional and artistic as well as intellectual and accept his irremediable limitations.
The teacher will help each child to gain skills and knowledge without unnecessary failure and a feeling of ‘inadequacy’. He will guide the group experiences, help each pupil to gain satisfaction and success in human relationships and in acting along socially constructive lines.
Besides, he will provide opportunities to children for their normal emotional responses. Such a teacher does not get disturbed when an out-burst of delinquent behaviour occurs in the classroom ; on the other hand, he handles it with objectivity and understanding, trying to get into the delinquents’ world and see things from their point of view.
The school, in order to perform its task in the prevention of delinquency or anti-social learning in our boys and girls, should stress, besides the acquisition of knowledge, the importance and dignity of manual labour, together with the development of proper attitudes towards the higher values of life.
This brings out the importance of moral instruction which, of late, is engaging the attention of educational thinkers in India. The significance of clubs, scouting, camping, guiding and home-room activities, in as much as they exercise a beneficial influence on anti-social tendencies, cannot be denied.
It is necessary to see that much stress on technical education, which is a recent trend in India, may not result in a sacrifice of the aims of broader liberal education. Above all a healthy teacher pupil relationship which used to act as a great moral force at one time, should be strengthened if the proper development of the super-ego of the child is aimed at.
It is high time that schools are provided with clinical services of school psychologists and teacher-counsellors so that early signs of maladjustment could be helped and saved from conflicts that will lead them to delinquent acts.
5. Recreational Facilities:
It is a common observation that children of the poorer classes living in highly congested localities or in slums do not usually have opportunities for any healthy recreation. They are often found gambling in street corners, visiting cheap picture-houses and looking for some kind of adventure on the streets.
It is necessary that society or the State provides opportunities to such children for adventurous, yet socially harmless, physical activities in the form of games, etc., as diversion from the anti-social expression of activities and locales in which more primitively organised boys can gain satisfaction, discharge their energies, and work off their tensions without running foul of legal restraint at every hand.
Bal-bhavans, youth clubs, Balwadis, libraries and hobby classes and the like will provide such leisure time activities. The wider use of school play-grounds and buildings for recreational civic and social purposes after school hours in one of the important preventive but positive programmes that can be developed in our society.
One precaution has to be taken in the use of these agencies. It is necessary that parents know the purpose of these agencies and send their children willingly. It is also necessary to see that these agencies do not foster feelings of indifference in parents as far as their relationship with their children is concerned.
This may happen if the stay in these recreation centres makes them feel as if they are absolved of the responsibility of taking interest in their children’s games and recreational activities. To prevent this, parents of children attending such centres should be invited, off and on, to witness their children’s games and play activities and, if possible, as it is being done in Russia to help in organising such activities for children of various age-groups. This is feasible and practicable if each residential locality has a definite play and recreational centre serving it.
In conclusion, we may point out the urgency of providing as preventive measures family and child welfare services for “transient families” and of rationalisation of the approach at the very first appearance of a young offender in the court. It is a fact that working class, families from the majority of this transient population, and they usually live in shacks in any open space, or in slums, preferably in close proximity to their place of work.
Their children, often neglected may wander about in the streets and gradually get into delinquency, unless helped in time. Similarly, the way in which the delinquent is handled in his first clash with the law of the community will often decide whether a criminal career shall result or not. An enlightened court can do much to prevent further delinquency by studying the problems of the individual child offender in a sympathetic and understanding manner.
6. Remedial Measures:
Correctional treatment methods of remedial measures for helping the delinquent are to two types:
(a) The extra-mural, and
(b) The intra-mural treatment methods.
The former include fines, corporal punishment and probation. They also include social case-work with the family, social group-work with the child and community organisation. Of the extra-mural treatment methods, fines and corporal punishments have fallen into deserved disrepute because these really punish the parents and not the child. In all extramural methods the child is treated at home.
The intra-mural treatment of the child takes place outside his home. It may necessitate the use of institutions such as approved schools, industrial schools, remand homes, foster homes, juvenile courts and that of psychological methods such as deep counselling, and psycho-therapy. Deep-counselling, psychotherapy, and psychiatric help will be very much indicated when his conflicts are unconscious rather than conscious, through the same methods can be beneficially used even when the conflicts are at the conscious level.
It is necessary that the organisation and atmosphere of approved schools, remand homes and foster-homes in such as build the child’s ego and make up the damage done in the original home or school, by engendering feelings of security and belongingness. All good treatment has to aim at developing feelings of self-confidence and hope in the young delinquent.