Page:1954 Juvenile Delinquency Testimony.pdf/77

Rh Dr. . A fair number of the children whom we see come from homes in whieh there is already a certain amount of disruption, Some- times this is of a superficial character in that both parents may be working and the child is simply left alone a good deal of the time.

In other instances, the family has been hroken up by divoree or desertion or there may be one er several parents who ave either physi- cally or emotionally disturbed.

I would say from my experience that for sucha child, material which painted parent figures in a horrendous ght that sueh a child would be unusually suseeptible to this kind of material because it would play into its own phantasies,

I think it is conceivable that this kind of material, presented in the fashion that we see in the comie books, could give an additional thrust to other forces already operating on the child.

Senator. May I ask Dr. Peck a question at that point?

The. You may.

Senator. It seems that I recall from reading of Ilans Christian Anderson and Grimm's Fairy Tales that there were a num- ber of those stories that related to the vicious, mean, overbearing step- mother, it seems they emphasized the step-relationship.

Dr. . Yes.

Senator. Now, there was a great deal that was pretty horrible in some of these things, was there not?

Dr. . Yes.

Senator. Going back and relating that sort of thing which has gone on for many generations by way of reading material for the very young and as I have suggested Poe's stories, and that sort of thing, how do we distinguish, or ean we distinguish between that sort of writing which is given to very young eluklren and has been for a long time, and this sort of thing about which we are now talking today?

Dr. . In some regards I think you cannot distingnish, I think some of the most vieious, even the very plots as you suggest, are identical.

Tt is for that reason that I think some caution must be observed in attributing to the comic books a major impetus for delinquency.

Among the differences, however, is that although characters are drawn rather in black and white lines, there is some development of character, there is, if you Hke, some humaneness about the stories, most of whneh are absent in the comic book materials which seem to enlarge on the most perverse aspeets of Lle human conseienee, at least in the kind of materials that were presented here.

One might also say, althoneh I think someone observed earlier in the hearings the earlier naterials were illustrated, [ think the type of illustration Lhat one sees here, especially the highly sexeralized ma- terial, was largely absent from some of the niore classical fairy tale material,

Now, I might say that a large group of the youngsters that we see in our court would be unable to reach very much of the elassieal fairy tale material because reading disability is so prevalent in this population.

So I suspect many of them react even more to the illustrative material than to the printed word, although that is kept at a very simple level.