DELINQUENCY AND MENTAL DEFICIENCY. Dr. Olga Bridgman. The Survey, June 13, 1914.
Report of examination of 118 consecutive admissions at the Illinois Training School for Girls at Geneva. Of the 118, 105, or 89%, showed a retardation of three years or more, thus ranking as mentally deficient, 6% were backward, being one or two years retarded, and six, or 5% were graded as normal. According to the Binet tests then, 97% of the children sent to this institution are mentally defective.
COMMERCIALIZED PROSTITUTION IN NEW YORK CITY. George Kneelands. Century Co., New York, 1913. (Chapter by Katherine B. Davis on a Study of Prostitutes Committed from New York City to the State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills.)
It is difficult to get at the actual truth as to the number of children the unmarried women have had. The Table shows the admission of 209 women on this point. There are 73 unmarried women who admit having had children, 16 were pregnant at the time of entering, and 18 had previously been pregnant. 428 claimed to have had no children. In this connection it may not be amiss to note the fact that an unmarried woman who has had a child is more apt to belong to the mentally defective class. Of the 647, 20.09% were shown to have hereditary degenerate strains, and 20.56% venereal disease. Page 180.
FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS
SOCIAL HYGIENE. March 1915. Vol. 1, No 2. Recent Progress in Social Hygiene in Europe. James B. Reynolds, Counsel, The American Social Hygiene Association.
Recent studies of prostitutes there (in Europe) as here have strikingly brought to light the significant relationship between prostitution and mental defectiveness. A far reaching contribution to the solution of the problems of sex education and prostitution was the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 for England and Wales. This Act was based on the Report of a Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded which made a careful and exhaustive study of the entire subject, including the methods of treatment of the mentally defective in all countries. The Commission declares that a great proportion of the evidence unmistakably indicates that mentally defective children are greatly lacking in self-control and peculiarly open to suggestion and hence specially susceptible to the influence of depraving companions. The testimony of numerous experts who appeared before the Commission is highly illuminating on these points. Dr. Kerr, medical officer of the London County Council, declared that sooner or later many of these children will be found in the hands of the police, or in maternity hospitals. Dr. Ashby, late medical officer of the Manchester Special Schools stated that the mental defectives tend to an increase of the criminal and immoral classes. Dr. Whittell, Medical Superintendent of the Suffolk County Asylum, argued that the natural and physical evolution of this class is apt to result in various offenses of sexual, or perverted sexual, nature. Dr. Corner, Lecturer on Mental Diseases in the North East London Post Graduate Hospital, said, “One of the most common and dangerous characteristics of the feeble-minded is that they tend to sink socially.” Another expert testified that mentally defective girls in large cities are subject to overwhelming temptations and pressure toward sexual immorality, while still another, looking to the larger aspects of the problem, called attention to the danger resulting from the immoral laxness of mentally defective girls, and the lowering of the mental stamina of the whole nation by the increase of a population of defective intellect. Sir Francis Galton went so far as to declare that mentally defective women commonly become prostitutes. The feeble-minded, as distinguished from idiots, are an exceptionally fecund class, mostly of illegitimate children, and a terrible proportion of their offspring are born mentally deficient. All these experts were in agreement that mentally defective girls are in great danger of becoming immoral, hence prostitutes.
DEGENERACY, ITS CAUSES, SIGNS AND RESULTS. Eugene S. Talbot, M.D. Walter Scott, Ltd., London; Chas. Scribner’s Sons, N. Y. 1898.
Pauline Tarnowsky in her study “Etudes Anthropometriques sur les Prostituées” finds that in Russia prostitution is crime in women taking the line of least resistance. She concludes from her researches, which mine tend to verify, that the prostitute as a rule is a degenerate being, the subject of an arrest of development, tainted with a morbid heredity, and presenting stigmata of physical and mental degeneracy fully in consonance with her imperfect evolution. C. Andronico of Messina, Italy, arrived some time previously at the same conclusions as those of Tarnowsky.
FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS, ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES. Henry Herbert Goddard, Director of the Research Laboratory of the Training School at Vineland, N. J., for Feeble-minded Boys and Girls. McMillan Co., 1914.