Note 9 — XI

Such a distinction might well be made in the attitude towards delinquency in our own civilisation. Delinquency cannot be defined even within one culture in terms of acts alone, but attitudes should also be considered. Thus the child who rifles her mother’s purse to get money to buy food for a party or clothes to wear to a dance hall, who believes stealing is wrong, but cannot or will not resist the temptation to steal, is a delinquent, if the additional legal definition is given to her conduct by bringing her before some judicial authority. The young Christian communist who gives away her own clothes and also those of her brothers and sisters may be a menace to her family and to a society based upon private property, but she is not delinquent in the same sense. She has simply chosen an alternative standard. The girl who commits sex offences with all attendant shame, guilt, and inability to defend herself from becoming continually more involved in a course of action which she is conscious is “wrong,” until she becomes a social problem as an unmarried mother or a prostitute, is, of course, delinquent. The young advocate of free love who possesses a full quiver of ideals and sanctions for her conduct, may be undesirable, but from the standpoint of this discussion, she is not delinquent.