WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.

Auditorium Hotel Oakland, 2:00 o'clock.

WOMAN'S ASSOCIATION.

Dr. Kenosha Sessions, Superintendent of the Indiana Girls' School, president of the Woman's Association, presided.

THE DELINQUENT GIRL.

DR. KENOSHA SESSIONS, INDIANAPOLIS.

The social worker finds no problem more baffling, more complex, more interesting and to some more hopeless, than that of the delinquent girl. It is a growing problem, however, which is facing us, growing in numbers, growing in complexity; and we are questioning ourselves as to whether we in any way understand either its cause, its treatment or its cure.

Let us consider briefly what the delinquent girl is, her characteristics, why she is and what we are trying to do for her, both prophylactic and curative.

The impression prevails that a delinquent girl means an unchaste girl. While the terms are not synonymous, the fact remains that a very large per cent of the girls who come before the juvenile courts are brought there because of sexual offenses. The question at once arises: Why are there so many girls who are committing, what society, strangely enough, considers a very slight offense in its male members but is the most serious of all offenses when committed by its female members; an offense which the girl herself is more ashamed of than any other; one in which she must do more violence to her feminine sense than any other; one which she knows lowers her more in the estimation of men, whose esteem she values, than any other sin?

For an answer we must turn to the girls themselves and study them both individually and as a class, for there are certain characteristics which are constant in this class of girls. These con stant characteristics, which may be called signs and symptoms, will

be considered under three headings: The type of people from whom the girl comes, her home and home surroundings and the girl herself, mentally and temperamentally.

With very few exceptions we find the delinquent girl comes of, either markedly vicious and immoral parents, or of generations of improvident, uncontrolled, undisciplined, unpurposeful people, people of low standards of morals, low standards of living; people who feel that they have done well when they have kept the wolf from the door and have kept out of the hands of the police; people who feel that the sacred duties of fatherhood and motherhood have been fully met when they have provided food and raiment for their children during the first twelve or fourteen years of their lives. The fathers are often drunken and grossly immoral; many times the mothers are equally bad. In a goodly per cent. of the cases where the mothers are not bad they are most inefficient, often indifferent, poor housekeepers, poor wives, poor mothers, weak in will power, helpless in discipline, the kind of mothers whose children soon override their feeble desire for them to do right and whose children soon get beyond their control and ken.

The

This is the type of intact home from which our girls come. intact home, however, is by no means in the majority. In a large per cent. of the cases the domestic relations are disturbed. The father and mother both dead, or one is dead with the consequent step-parent, with whom the girl does not agree, or the parents are separated with one or both remarried, and, as a consequence of these various broken domestic relations the girl may have anywhere from none to four parents, all either vicious or inefficient. One girl who comes to my mind in this connection, at thirteen years old assumed the responsibility of the household, she being the eld est of five, the mother having deserted the family. The father, a drunkard, who provided indifferently, would frequently come home drunk and beat the girl and again he would leave her alone mothering and fathering these younger children for three weeks at a time. This mothering she did to the best of her ability, cooking, washing, ironing for the household, nursing faithfully a little brother who sickened and died. It was a pathetic sight, this little mother, a child herself, managing that funeral and these other children.

time the responsibility became too heavy, it was all too grey, she sought a little outlet for the youth there was in her. What outlet was there for a girl so situated?

The resultant of all this is that such homes are far from comfortable or wholesome places in which children may grow up with the right conception of or the right attitude towards life. It is a dreary place, with poverty and dissension. She seeks youth and companionship in the streets and in the parks. She works in the home for which she receives no compensation and when she reaches about twelve or fourteen she goes out to work. And where does this girl with this background of family and home training or lack of it, go to work? Sometimes into homes, sometimes into factories or stores, many times to wash dishes or wait on tables at cheap restaurants or hotels.

So much for the girl's family and home surroundings. The whole subject of the girl's family and home surroundings may be summed up in the remarks of the old lady who was discussing her son who had fallen into the ranks of the army of the defeated. She said, "Yes, I know Johnnie has an awful temper but I can tell you right now he didn't get it from no stranger." These girls get the elements, positive and negative, which cause their delinquency from "no stranger."

It is well to keep this birth, breeding and background steadily in mind while considering the girl herself, mentally and temperamentally. Mentally we find at least fifty per cent. of the girls who come to us are markedly subnormal, almost if not quite to the point of feeble-mindedness. Should they remain in school indefinitely they would be unable to pass beyond the third or fourth grade. Of the remaining fifty per cent. the greater number of them are abnormal, erratic, poorly balanced.

The Wasserman test shows that twenty per cent. of the girls in the Indiana Girls' School have the syphilitic taint in the blood. Eighty per cent. of the girls having this taint have inherited it. Of these girls who have the inherited taint, not one has a normal mind.

Temperamentally, these girls have nothing of the stolid in their makeup. They are keenly alive; they respond and react to

every external force and influence, both good and bad, and as their surroundings and influences have for the most part been bad, they responded to the bad. Their emotional natures are highly developed. They are a bundle of emotions, good and bad, with no conception of how to control or direct these emotions, with a very misty, vague sense of right and wrong. Truthfulness, clean thinking, clean living, honorable, trustworthy conduct is a thing that must be taught them, line upon line. They love life, they love the gay, the bright, the beautiful, the joyous. They love to be happy. They are industrious, willing, kind, generous, loving, longing for love and praise, and appreciation, full of kindly affection for which there has never been any wholesome outlet.

This is the girl, badly born, badly trained, undisciplined, unrestrained, that is, so to speak, laid out upon the world at twelve and fourteen years of age; eager for all the things in life that every human being longs for, companionship, appreciation, joy and love. She is an easy prey and a delicious morsel for that ravenous beast known as society. It is not difficult to see why so many girls find their way into the juvenile courts. Organized society begins to take note of her at this stage of her career, rather late but better than not at all. If organized society had taken some note of the little girl mentioned above who at thirteen, mistreated by a drunken father, was struggling to mother the four younger children, and if organized society had given her some help, some encouragement, some appreciation, some joy in her life, who knows but the juvenile court would never have known her, the State have been spared much expense and this girl saved from the worst which can befall a girl. Organized society should have taken some note of this girl earlier than the time of which we speak; when she was a babe in her mother's arms. What a splendid opportunity for some woman, a college graduate, an educated woman, a good woman with intelligence, dignity and poise, to come into the life of this untaught, untrained, unpurposeful mother and to teach her the beauty of womanhood, the tremendous responsibility and the wonderful sacredness of motherhood.

There is no broader field and no more important missionary work today than this that lies at the very doors and rests on the

consciences of those women who have had advantages, who have leisure and who know what life means. It is for them to go into these homes, to these untaught mothers, and out of their abundance feed their poor starved, cramped souls, and teach them what womanhood means, what motherhood means, what life means.

To return to our girl in the juvenile court. She is found to be delinquent. To quote from the Century Dictionary, "A delinquent is one who fails to discharge an obligation." This girl, perhaps cursed with a blood taint before birth, reared in a home of poverty, inefficiency and discord, shoved out into a ravenous world while yet a child, does not really seem under very great obligations to anything or anybody. It is a little difficult to see just how she has failed to discharge her obligations and is, therefore, a delinquent. However, this is what she is called and she finds her way into one of the correctional schools. It is the purpose of these correctional schools to correct and undo in a brief two or three years the cumulative result of forty years of indifference and neglect on the part of organized society.

In such a school it is the purpose to put before the girl right living; every effort is made to eradicate from her mind and her life the things which have been hurtful, to get her into the right attitude toward honest work, toward herself, toward her fellow man and toward her Maker; to teach her to do right because it is right and to leave off the wrong because it is wrong-in short, construc tive and reconstructive work with the girl herself, character building. Along with and as a means used in this training of the heart and conscience, is a training of the hand. The girl is given a thorough course of training in all the domestic arts. She is taught what her mother never knew, how to be a good housewife, a good home maker. When she has finished this domestic course and shows by her conduct in the school that her attitude is right, that she is trustworthy, she is then sent out into the world under the guardianship of the school to earn her way and to make for herself a new place in the world. A very encouraging per cent. of girls thus sent out have succeeded. They are living honorable, useful lives in the homes of others or their own homes, good members of society.

This brings us to the most perplexing problem of the delinquent