Page:1954 Juvenile Delinquency Testimony.pdf/94

82 The methods that we have used are the ordinary methods used m psychiatry, clinical interviews, group interviews, intelligence tests, reading tests, projective tests, drawings, the study of dreams, and so on.

This study was not subsidized by anybody. None of my associates vot avy money, ever. I myself have never spoken on the subject of comic books and accepted a fee for that.

This research was a sober, painstaking, laborious chimeal study, and in some eases, since it has been going on now for 7 years, we have had a chance to follow for several years.

In addition to that we have read all ihat we could get hold of that was written in defense of comics, which is almost a more trying task than reading the comic books themselves.

What is in comic books? Yn the lirst place, we have completely restricted ourselves to comic books themselves. That leaves ont news- paper comic strips entirely.

1 must say, however, that when some very harmless comic strips for children printed in newspapers are reprinted for children in comic books, you suddenty exn find whole pages of gun advertise- ments which the newspaper editor would not permit to have inserted in the newspaper itself.

There have been, we have found, arbitvary classifications of comic books according to the locale where something takes place.

We have found that these classifications don't work if you want to understand what a child reatly thinks or does.

We have eome to the conchision that crime comic books are comic books that depict erime and we have fonnd that it makes no dif- ference whether the lovale is western, or Superman or space ship or horroy, if a girl is raped she is raped whether it is in a space ship or on the prairie.

Ifa man is killed he is killed whether he comes from Mars or same- where else, and we have fonnd, therefore, two large groups, the crime comic books and the others.

T would like to illustrate my remarks by western comic books by viving youan example, Thus is from an ordinary western comic book. You might call it the wide open spaces.

This is from an ordinary western comic book. You see this man hitting this girl with a gun. It is a sadistic, criminal, sexual scene.

We have also studied how much time children spend on erime comte books and how much money they spend. I should like to tell you that there ure thousands of children who spend about $60 a year on comic books.

Even poor children. I don't know where they get the money. I have seen children who have spent $74 a year and more, and I, myset, have observed when we went through these candy stores in different places, not only in New York, how 1 boy in a slum neighborhood, seemingly a poor boy, bought 15 comic books at a time.

Now, people generalize about juvenile delinquency and they have pet theories and they leave out how much time, und, meidentally, how much money children spend on this commodity alone.

Now, as far as the effects on juvenile delinquency are concerned, we distinguish four groups of delinquency: