CHILD CRIMINALS.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1426, 13 November 1923, Page 6

CHILD CRIMINALS.

«BLACKEST SPOT" IN WEST END.

SUNDAY WICKEDNESS

The problem of the delinquent child , —including truants and petty theives, the girl who runs away from home and the hoy who has put the kitten on the fire—was examined from many points of view by learned doctors and scientists meetnig at the British Association at Liverpool. Dr C. Burt, of London, classifying the evidence of 200 cases examined, said it was impossible to maintain Chat criminality was inherent to any great extent! Only 10 per cent of the children had relatives who had been sentenced for crimes.

Poverty and bad housing were now the causes of the evil, for more than four-fifths of the cases came from homes that were quite comfortable. one found a starving child driven by hunger to steal, but in these days of school feeding theee cases were rare. More frequently stolen money was used by girls particularly for sweets, trinkets, visits to the cinema, and tramway rides.

The absence of facilities for innocent

occupation and amusement in many homes wa6 a more serious factor than poverty in producing petty crime. The effect of defective family relationships was striking. In 40 per cent of the cases the mother or father was dead or the parents were separated or divorced.

Resentment against a stepmother or jealousy of the baby also exerted an influence, and when Bobby stole a banana or Mary stole money and ran away, they were taking to adventure very much as a grown-up took to alcohol as a sedative or a distraction. They did not want to hit the stepmother or throw the baby out of the window, but they wanted to find an outlet for their feelings in something

not quite so wicked. Excessive facilities for amusement were somethimes as dangerous as too few. " I once mapped the whole of London from the point of view of juvenile delinquency," said Dr Burt, "and I found it centred in a small district of the West End. In a set of streets where every other building was either a theatre, a kinema, a restaurant, or a public house, there was the blackest spot for juvenile crime. In the dreary suburbs crime is less frequent, and where there are parks or open spaces there the delinquent child is rarest."

Speaking of c'hiklren who had nothing to occupy them, getting into trouble, Dr W. A. Potts, Birmingham, said it was found in Scotland that three times as many offences were committed by children on Sundays as on other days.