Conclusion
Young girls who consciously become involved in the seduction of older men must be, for lack of anything better, termed psychopathological and psychosexual delinquents.
The straight use of the term "delinquency" suffers from a looseness of definition. It may include all deviant behavior among the young, ranging from actions that are classed as criminal among adults, such as assault and robbery, to offenses that are strictly age-related, such as truancy, drinking and sexual activities.
The forms of sexual delinquency, such as those we have examined in this book, have steadily increased in almost every country in the world. It appears to be a feature of modern industrial society, in which rapid technological change, high rates of mobility, and the conditions of urban life result in social instability, what sociologists refer to as anomie, or normlessness. The concept of anomie, however, is insufficient to account for the various forms of deviance both between and within cultures.
The essential idea in the theories about delinquency in the early 1950's was that some defect or distortion in the conscience was present. Most experts thought that this abnormality was caused by a constitutional inability to develop an inner control system, by identification with a pathological parent or parent figure, by severe and cruel social and emotionally traumatic experiences in a particular social or cultural group, or by some combination of these factors. Healy and Bonner, pioneers in the field, thought that parental coldness was the major factor. However, Szurek and Johnson demonstrated in their clinical work the high probability of the existence of specific defects in the conscience.1
The Johnson-Szurek thesis is that the antisocial behavior in the adolescent is encouraged unconsciously by a parent or parents who participate in the process, vicariously gain pleasure in the adolescents' deeps, and subtly carry out their own unconscious hostile, destructive and deviant sexual feelings toward the child.
Current ideas about the psychopathology in delinquent behavior usually contain these four elements:
1) Johnson A. M. and Szurek, S. A. "The Genesis of Antisocial Acting Out In Children and Adults." Psychoanalytical Quarterly, 21: 323, 1952.
(I) The child feels significant emotional deprivation and strongly resents it.
(2) The child cannot establish his own range of skills because his parents have not set limits for him.
(3) The parents, especially the mother, are very often overstimulating and inconsistent in their attitudes toward the child.
(4) The child's behavior usually represents a vicarious source of pleasure and gratification for a parent and is often an expression of the parent's unconscious hostility toward the child, as the behavior is either overtly or covertly self-destructive to the child.
The prognosis in treating antisocial and dyssocial reactions in the psychosexual area such as we have been concerned with here is only poor to fair. The main factor in increasing the chance for a complete readjustment to a normal psychosexual attitude rests with both the child and the parents being motivated towards a genuine exploration of the underlying sources of the undesirable behavior, aided, of course, by competent psychiatric help.