Juvenile delinquency in a developing country: a province example in Turkey

The aim of this study was to determine offence behavior, socio-demographic characteristics and some features of the juvenile offenders' families in a selected region, and compare with developed countries. A total of 165 juvenile offenders were included. Information was obtained by individually interviewing all children. Of a total of 165 juveniles, 162 (98%) were boys. The most frequently committed crimes were theft (52%) and wounding (20%). Of these juveniles, 33% were 14 years old when they committed offence, 21% had a history of an offence behavior, 14.5% had an offender sibling, 36% had smoking habits, 21% had a history of running away from home, and 28% had a history of internal migration. Mild psychiatric disorders were detected in 9 (5.4%) and 51% of them were not student at the time of offence behavior. Most of the families were crowded and had rather low economical and educational levels. Some features such as low income and low family educational levels, insufficient parental control, crowded family, migration, repetition of offences, and cigarette smoking were found to be risk factors for offensive behavior. These risk factors can be taken into consideration for the prevention of future crimes.     

Substance use and personal adjustment among disadvantaged teenagers: A six-month prospective study

Using a 2-wave longitudinal design with a 6-month interval, associations were examined between substance use and emotional/behavioral adjustment among 138 inner-city ninth-grade students. Substance use was operationalized in terms of self-reported severity of problems associated with use of alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs. Adjustment was measured based on various sources including ratings by the self, by peers, and by teachers, as well as school records. Cross-sectional data indicated that drug use showed associations in expected directions with all indices of adjustment with the exception of peer-rated sociability. Longitudinal analyses indicated that high levels of drug use early in the year were related to subsequent increases in behavioral and emotional maladjustment. Early maladjustment, across different domains, conversely, was minimally associated with escalations in drug use. Results are discussed in terms of mechanisms potentially underlying prospective associations, as well as implications for interventions.This research was supported by funding to the first author by Research Scientist Development Award K21-DA00202, by grant P50-DA09241, and an award from the Social Science Research Council through funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.Graduate student in clinical psychology     

FORGETTING DOES (NOT) HURT. Historical Revisionism in Post-Socialist Slovenia

After the fall of socialism, besides the attempts to reach national reconciliation, radical reconfigurations and reinterpretations of the past were used to negotiate local, national and transnational identities and strengthen national agendas. In most of the formerly socialist countries, the historical interpretation significantly resembles the struggle over the legitimacy and authenticity of this representation. The author argues that in post-socialist Slovenia instead of the anticipated democratization and break with ideologically predestined historical work after 1989, at least three competing politically contaminated ways of interpreting the past gained momentum: the so-called liberal-conformist position, which insists that we have to look at the future and forget the traumas of the past; the revisionist standpoint which, at least in Slovenia, is the most aggressive one; and the objectivistic approach practiced by most Slovenian historians after 1991. To do that the author investigates how collective memories are mobilized in general, formal and in particular more personalized and/or emotional narratives and traces the changes in Slovenian memorial landscape divided into categories: the authoritarian type, defined by a desire for direct colonization of the interpretation of the past related to the Second World War; the conciliatory type that tries to achieve “reconciliation”; the conflicting type that clashes with the iconography of an existing partisan monument as an alternative interpretation.