JUVENILE CRIME RECORDS

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28051, 20 August 1956, Page 3

JUVENILE CRIME RECORDS

CARD SYSTEM TO AID RESEARCH

A “ready reckoner” on juvenile delinquency which may provide answers to some of the questions troubling social workers and parents has been compiled by the Child Welfare Division. It is a punched-card classification of all Children’s Court cases for the last five years,, which will enable surveys of many kinds to be carried out rapidly and with a minimum of human error.

As the card records accumulate in the years to come, the division will be able to judge at short notice where the most pressing problems exist. There are strong popular beliefs on many aspects of juvenile wrongdoing. but the daunting task of going through thousands of case files has hindered research workers in providing positive answers. Do children tend to get into trouble repeatedly? What is the effect of broken homes on juvenile crime? Do children whose mothers are working tend to commit offences more than those whose mothers are at home? Do children before the Courts come more from large than from small families? The cards will provide some of the answers, and give research workers a firmer basis for investigation of the emotional disturbances which lead children and adolescents into trouble.

The Child Welfare Division deals with boys and girls up to the age of 17 or 18- and the card records show whether they are at school or at work at the time of a court appearance. If at school, the class, attendance record and intelligence are listed. Children are classified according to sex. age. and the degree to which they follow a religious faith.

Locality Important The locality in which children live is an important factor in child welfare work, and it is now possible with the aid of the cards to discover the proportions of children appearing before the Courts who come from, for example. State housing, ordinary suburban areas, sub-standard housing districts, and rural areas.

The new records also show whether children are pakeha or Maori, or any one of a number of racial mixtures found in New Zealand.

In recording the type of offence, the child’s act has been recordea rather than the legal working of the charge. Vague descriptions, sucn as “interfering with parked car” or “unlawfully on premises,” which might disguise the real nature of the offence, have been avoided. One aspect of delinquency on which the new records should shed light is the proportion of offences committea. for example, at week-ends or in school holidays, and during, before or after school hours. Taken over the whole country, or in a particular district, it might be shown that more offences were committed at one time than another. This might indicate that parental supervision was not st/ong enough at a particular time of day. or that in a particular town, better recreational facilities might be needed. All the information for the new records has been compiled from the reports of child welfare officers, which are considered by magistrates in every case which comes before them in' the Children’s Courts.