Form 1.—The Neighborhood Triangle.
A study by Miss Evelyn Buchan of girl delinquency shows the effect of the increasing mobility and promiscuity of city life upon the behavior of youth, and suggests an interesting method of study. To bring into clearer relief the rôle of mobility and promiscuity as factors in behavior, a device called “the delinquency triangle” was employed. The three points of the triangle were located by spotting the home of the girl, the home of her male companion, and the place of delinquency. Three typical forms of the triangle soon appeared.
Form 1 represents the traditional form of sex delinquency, where all three points of the triangle are within the community. This may be called the “neighborhood triangle.” In this case the intimacy of the boy and girl might be little more than the continuance in this country of old-world folkways, but without the protection for the girl in subsequent marriage which the European peasant mores afford.
Form 2.—The Mobility Triangle.
Form 2, which is “the mobility triangle,” stands for delinquency of the type related to increased freedom of movement, where two points of the triangle or its base, formed by the homes of the girl and the boy, lie within the same community, but where its apex, or the place of delinquency, is situated outside. In this case the bright-light area becomes a place of freedom from the narrower, distant controls of the home and the neighborhood.
Form 3.—The Promiscuity Triangle.
In form 3, delinquency is of the type of promiscuity, because here all the points of the triangle lie in different communities. The intimacy developing from the casual acquaintance of the metal worker from the steel mills with the girl from the West Side whom he “picked up” at an amusement park may be so transient that neither knows the family name or the address of the other.
The total effect of forces of city life, like mobility and promiscuity, upon the neighborhood and upon our traditional culture seems to be subversive and disorganizing. Particularly is this true of deteriorating areas, where neighborhood work originated, and where it is still, in any completely developed state, for the most part confined. A series of maps has been prepared which shows graphically what, of course, is known to social students—that the zone of deterioration and the areas of the greatest mobility in the city have the greatest concentration of poverty, vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, divorce, desertion, abandoned infants, murder, and suicide.