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for instance, become criminals; many make their living as athletes or in a variety of professions. Studies in Great Britain have shown that delinquents tend to come from families where there is tension and much difficulty in interpersonal relationships. Family breakdown is also found to be a significant factor.

Many delinquents come from homes where the parents abuse alcohol or drugs or are themselves criminals. Poverty, physical and verbal abuse, parents with little respect for themselves, and erratic discipline patterns emerge as contributing factors in such research.

Social factors

In the United States, Europe, and Japan, most delinquents are boys, though since the early 1980s the number of delinquents who are girls has risen dramatically. Most of these in the United States come from the lower middle class and the poorest segments of society. One reason for this is the low esteem in which education is often held in these groups. Schooling seems boring and unchallenging, and the delinquent rebels against it by cutting classes or disrupting them and eventually may drop out altogether — as more then one quarter of teens did by the early 1990s. Such youths find in each other’s company a compensation for their educational failure by rejecting the social values to which they are supposed to adhere. To make up for this failure, and finding their job market limited, they live dangerously and show contempt for authority.

Types of delinquent behaviour

Traditionally, delinquency meant offences such as truancy, assault, theft, arson, or vandalism. In recent decades more violent crimes by teens became more common, especially for those who traffic in drugs or are addicted and commit crimes to support their habits. Bigotry could be seen in teens of all races; one example is the rise of white-supremacist gangs called skinheads.

Society’s response

Society tries to deal with youthful offenders in a variety of ways. The juvenile courts attempt to steer young people away from a life of crime, though the most serious offences normally result in periods of confinement in juvenile halls or prisohstor younger criminals. If possible, however, the courts try more lenient methods of probation, juvenile aftercare, or foster care.

Probation means that the court suspends sentence and releases the offender on the condition of good behaviour, subject to certain rules and under the supervision of the court. Probation is frequently granted to first-time offenders.

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Sometimes in order to avoid bringing a case before the court, informal probation under the supervision of a probation officer is prescribed. Probation has proved to be the most successful way of dealing with very young offenders.

Juvenile aftercare is the equivalent of parole for an older criminal; it takes place after the young person has been released from an institution and is supervised by a youth counsellor. The purpose of aftercare is to promote readjustment to society.

Answer the following questions.

1.Where do you stand on nature Vs nurture controversy issue? What are the backgrounds of criminal behaviour?

2.Is juvenile delinquency a vital topic in your country?

T E X T 4

REAL CRIME AND PSEUDO CRIME!

In the traditional English detective story, written by someone like Agatha Christie, the crime is nearly always murder. It often takes place in a country house, and the local inspector, who undertakes the investigation, is incapable of solving the case, and needs the help of a private detective. The detective begins by making a series of inquiries and looking for clues. The suspects are usually upper class, and have a motive for killing the victim. The detective eventually resolves the mystery by inviting all those under suspicion to meet. He sets a trap for the murderer, and establishes his guilt by going through the evidence. The murdered obligingly gives himself away, and confesses, providing the proof of the detective’s accusation. The grateful police inspector arrives to make the formal charge and put the murderer under arrest.

In real life, the crime is usually not murder but an offence against property, on a scale ranging from shoplifting through theft to burglary and robbery with violence. Other offences involving money, like fraud and forgery, are also much more common than murder. If the case is solved, it is usually because the police receive information that puts them on the track of the criminal or he leaves traces behind him such as fingerprints. Sometimes offering a reward helps to convict someone. But few thieves or robbers confess unless they know they will be found guilty and hope to get a lighter sentence, and the police seldom invite them to a party with other suspects!

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T E X T 5

MEETING THE CHALLENGES

OF TRANSNATIONAL CRIME

“Organized crime weakens the very basis of government. There can be no good governance without the rule of law.” Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director, United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention ountries throughout the world face an unprecedented challenge. Transnational organized crime, taking full advantage of the globalization of the world economy and the profound telecommunication, has expanded the scope of its activities to reap ever-increasing the scope illegal profits.

Never before has there been so much economic opportunity for so many people, but never before has there been so much opportunity for criminal organizations to exploit the system.

Criminal groups traffic in human beings, particularly in women and children, for economic slavery and prostitution. They smuggle arms and ammunitions, launder huge sums of money, commit fraud on a global scale, and traffic in illegal drugs and nuclear material. They corrupt and bribe public officials, politicians and business leaders. They murder people.

Governments acting individually or through traditional forms of international cooperation can no longer meet this challenge, now the greatest non-military threat to national security.

T E X T 6

FROM THE HISTORY OF TERRORISM

Terrorist acts date back to at least the 1st century, when the Zealots, a Jewish religious sect, fought against Roman occupation of what is now Israel. In the 12th century in Iran, the Assassins, a group of Ismailis (Shiite Muslims), conducted terrorist acts against religious and political leaders of Sunni Islam. Through the 18th century, terrorists generally acted from religious zeal. Beginning in the 19th century, terrorist movements acquired a more political and revolutionary orientation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anarchists in Italy, Spain, and France used terrorism. Prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the Russian revolutionary movement also possessed a strong terrorist element in its struggle against Russian royalty and aristocracy.

In the latter half of the 20th century acts of terror multiplied, driven by fierce nationalist and ideological motivations and facilitated by technological advances in transportation, communications, microelectronics, and explosives. The conflict between Arab nations and Israel following the end of World War II

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UNIT IV

T E X T 1

THE FILIPINO AND THE DRUNKARD

This loud-mouthed in the brown camel-hair coat was not really mean? He was drunk. He took a sudden dislike to the small well-dressed Filipino and began to order him around the waiting-room, telling him to get back, not to crowd up among the white people. They were waiting to get on the boat and cross the bay to Oakland. If he hadn’t been drunk no one would have noticed him at all, but he was making a commotion in the waiting-room while everyone seemed to be in sympathy the Filipino, no one seemed to want to bother about helping the boy, and poor Filipino was becoming very frightened.

He stood among the people, and this drunkard kept pushing up against him and saying, “I told you to get back. Go away back. I twenty-four months in France. I’m a real American. I don’t want you standing up here among white people.”

The boy kept politely out of the drunkard’s way, hurrying through the crowd, not saying anything. He kept dodging in and out, with the drunkard following him, and as time went on the drunkard’s dislike grew and he began to swear at the boy. He kept saying, “You fellows are the best-dressed men in San Francisco, and you make your money washing dishes. You’ve got no right to wear to such fine clothes.”

He swore a lot, and it got so bad that a lot of ladies had to imagine they were deaf and weren’t hearing any of the things he was saying.

When the big door opened, the young Filipino moved swiftly the people, running from the drunkard, reaching the boat before anyone else. He ran to a corner, sat down for a moment, then got up and began looking for a more hidden place. At the other end of the boat was the drunkard. He could hear the man swearing. He looked about for a place to hide, and rushed into the lavatory. He went into one of the open compartments and bolted the door.

The drunkard entered the lavatory and began asking others in the room if they had seen the boy. He was a real American, he said. He had been wounded twice in the War.

In the lavatory he swore more freely, using words he could never use where women were present. He began to look beyond the shut doors of the various

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compartments. I beg your pardon, he said to those he was not seeking, and when he came to the compartment where the boy was standing, he began swearing and demanding that the boy came out.

“You can’t get away from me,” he said. “You got no right to use a place white man use. Come out or I’ll break the door.”

“Go away,” the boy said.

The drunkard began to pound on the door.

“You got to come out some time,” he said. “I’ll wait here till you do”. “Go away,” said the boy. “I’ve done nothing to you.” He wondered why none of the men in the lavatory calmed the drunkard took him away, and he realized there were no other men the lavatory. “Go away,” he said.

The drunkard answered with curses, pounding the door. Behind the door, the boy’s bitterness grew to rage. He began to tremble. Not fearing the man but fearing the rage growing in himself. He took knife from his pocket and drew open the sharp blade, holding the knife tightly in his fist. “Go away”, he said. “I have a knife. I do not want any trouble.” The drunkard said he was American. Twenty-four month in France. Wounded twice. Once in the leg, and once in the thigh. He would not go away. He was afraid of no dirty little yellow-belly Filipino with a knife. Let the Filipino come out, he was an American.

“I will kill you”, said the boy.” I do not want kill any man. You are drunk. Go away.”

“Please do not make any trouble”, he said earnestly. He could the motor of the boat pounding. It was like his rage pounding. It was a feeling of having been humiliated, chased about and made to hide, and now it was wish to be free even if he had to kill. He trust the door open and tried to rush beyond the man, the knife tight in his fist but the drunkard caught him by the sleeve and drew him back. The sleeve of boy’s coat ripped, and the boy turned and drew the knife into the side of the drunkard, feeling it scrape against rib-bon. The drunkard shouted and screamed at once, then caught the at the throat, and the boy began to throat, and the boy began to thrust the knife into the side of the man many times, as a boxer jabs in the clinches.

When the drunkard could no longer hold him and had fallen to the floor, the boy rushed from the room, the knife still in hand, blood dripping from the blade, his hat gone, his hair mussed, and the sleeve of his coat badly torn. Everyone knew what he had done, yet no one moved. The boy ran to the front of the boat, seeking some place to go, then ran back to a corner, no one daring to speak to him, and everyone aware of his crime. There was no place to go, and before the officers of the boat arrived he stopped suddenly and began to shout at the people.

“I did not want to hurt him,” he said. “Why didn’t you stop him? Is it right to chase a man like a rat? You knew he was drunk. I did not want to hurt him, but he would not let me go. He tore my coat and tried to choke me. I told him I would

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kill him if he would not go away. It is not my fault. I must go to Oakland to see my brother. He is sick. Do you think I am looking for trouble when my brother is sick? Why didn’t you stop him?”

(William Saroyan)

T E X T 2

FOR ASIAN IMMIGRANTS IN U.S., A WALL

OF WORDS SEPARATES GENERATIONS

Sung Jong Chang and her 16-year-old son have trouble talking to each other. They barely communicate, in fact.

The reason cuts far deeper that the normal parent-teenager divide. Mrs. Chang, a Korean immigrant who works seven days a week in the family restaurant’s business, speaks almost no English. Her son, John Kim, who came to the United States as a toddler, knows little Korean. At home in Fairfax City, Virginia, she watches Korean television and videos. In the car she listens to Korean radio. At work and church, she speaks Korean with her friends and colleagues. Working 12 hours a day, she has little opportunity, or need even, to learn anew language.

John, however, is 100 per cent Americanized. His friendships, his classes at school, his tastes — all are firmly rooted in the English language and American culture.

In a society that insistently hammers into parents the importance of talking to, and spending time with, their children, many immigrants can hardly do either. Working one or more jobs to provide for their families leaves little time for family life, never mind learning English. At the same time, there is evidence that the children of today’s immigrants are loosing their parents’ language much faster than second-generation children did ten years ago. The result, say sociologists and other who study the effects of immigration, is a troubling new family dynamic on the rise: a generation of children growing up almost strangers to their parents.

“For most of us, it would be an easy choice,” said Kattleen Harris, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina. “Of course you would learn to communicate with your child. But not if it meant you couldn’t have food on your table.”

Twelve years after arriving in the United States, Mrs. Chang has come to believe that she is loosing her son across a great cultural chasm. It pains her greatly — but she lacks the means to tell him even that much. Instead, she relies on her daughter to speak to her. 18-year-old Sun Mi Kim, who grew up speaking English and is now learning Korean, serves as go-between for her mother and

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brother, translating nearly everything that passes between them, even their shouting matches. But because Sun Mi’s Korean is limited, much is left unspoken — and many feelings explored — in the family.

Now, when Mrs. Chan sees her son despondent when she comes home at night after her long working day, she wonders if their language barrier has taken its toll. “I’m afraid that by now my son might have given up trying to communicate,” the 47-year-old mother said through a translator one recent afternoon while taking a break from her kitchen duties at one of the family’s restaurants.

Previous waves of American immigrants converted from their native languages to English over three or four generations, with a buffer between: An English-speaking child might grow up having difficulty to his Italian-born grandfather, for example, but usually the generation sandwiched in the middle was fluent in both languages. Now the change is happening much more rapidly, said Ruben Rumbaut, a sociologist at Michigan State University. “We are seeing this country become a language graveyard for the second generation,” he said, “with children and parents living under the same roof but unable to talk to one another.”

In a continuing study of 5.300 immigrant families, Mr. Rumbaut found that 73 % of the youngsters surveyed in 1991 said English was their primary language by the time they reached seventh grade, but 94 % of the parents spoke another language at home. In 1995, the figure of the parents was about the same, while the number of the children speaking mainly English had jumped to 88 %. A survey of immigrant families in Fairfax Country, Virginia, last year found that 53 % of the households had at least one parent or guardian who spoke little or no English; in 27 % of the families, no parent or guardian could speak English.

Adding to the dissolution of communication is the fact that many cultures — particularly those in Asia — do not encourage parents to sit down for heart-to-hearts with their children or get actively involved at their schools.

(David Cho, Washington Post Service

April, 13, 2001

International Herald Tribune)

T E X T 3

THE BRITISH PEOPLE AS THEY ARE

Great Britain is an island on the outer edge of the European continent, and its geographical situation has produced a certain insular spirit among its inhabitants, who tend, a little more perhaps than other people, to regard their own community as the centre of the world. The insularity produces a certain particularism among the numerous groups of whom the whole community is composed. The British look on foreigners in general with contempt and think

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that nothing is as well done elsewhere as in their own country. The British people have also been known as superior, snobbish, aloof, hypocritical and unsociable. These characteristics have been noted by people from all over the world, but are they typical of all the Britons? The ordinary Briton was seen to be friendly and sociable. There are indeed two nations, with basically different outlooks and characters, in Britain. The two nations are defined simply as the rich and the poor. The traditional opinion about the British, or the English in earlier centuries, was based on the habits of those Britons who could afford to travel, the diplomats and merchants. English vanity and arrogance grew as England fought off the competition from other European countries and became the world’s leading trading nation, going on to industrialize rapidly.

Englishmen tend to be rather conservative, they love familiar things. They are hostile, or at least bored, when they hear any suggestion that some modification of their habits, or the introduction of something new and unknown into their lives, might be to their advantage. This conservatism, on a national scale, may be illustrated by reference to the public attitude to the monarchy, an institution which is held in affection and reverence by nearly all English people.

Britain is supposed to be the land of law and other. Part of the British sense for law and orderliness is a love of precedent. For an Englishman, the best of all reasons for doing something in a certain way is that it has always been done in that way.

The Britons are practical and realistic; they are infatuated with common sense. They are not misled by romantic delusions.

The English sense and feeling for privacy is notorious. England is the land of brick fences and stone walls (often with glass embedded along the top), of hedges, of thick draperies at all the windows, and reluctant introductions, but nothing is stable now. English people rarely shake hands except when being introduced to someone for the first time. They hardly ever shake hands with their friends except seeing them after a long interval or saying good-bye before a long journey.

Snobbery is not so common in England today as it was at the beginning of the century. It still exists, however, and advertisers know how to use it in order to sell their goods. The advertisers are very clever in their use of snobbery. Motorcar manufactures, for example, advertise the colour of their cars as “Embassy Black” or “Balmoral Stone”. Embassy black is plain, ordinary black, but the name suggests diplomats and all the social importance that surrounds them, and this is what the snobs need.

The British people are prudent and careful about almost everything. Their lawns are closely cropped, their flower beds primly cultivated, and their trees neatly pruned. Everything is orderly. Drinks are carefully measured, seats in a cinema are carefully assigned (even if the theatre is empty you are required to sit in the seat assigned to you), closing hours are rigorously observed.

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A tradition that is rooted not only in their own soul, but in the minds of the rest of the world is the devotion of the English to animals. Animals are protected by law. If, for instance, any one leaves a cat to starve in an empty house while he goes for his holiday, he can be sent to prison. There are special dogs’ cemeteries. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded half a century before its counterpart for the prevention of cruelty to children.

Most people in Britain work a five-day week, from Monday to Friday; schools, colleges and universities are also closed on Saturdays and Sundays. As Friday comes along, as people leave work they say to each other, “Have a nice week-end.” Then on Monday morning they ask, “Did you have a nice week-end?”

On Sunday mid-morning most British people indulge in some fairly light activities such as gardening, washing the car, shelling peas or chopping mint for Sunday lunch, or taking the dog for a walk. Another most popular pre-lunch activity consists of a visit to a “pub” — either a walk to the “local”, or often nowadays a drive to a more pleasant “country pub” if one lives in a built-up area. The national drink in England is beer, and the “pub” is a peculiarly English institution.

Much leisure time is spent in individualistic pursuits, of which the most popular is gardening. Most English people love gardens, their own above all, and this is probably one reason why so many people prefer to live in houses rather than flats.

The British people are the world’s greatest tea drinkers. They drink a quarter of all the tea grown in the world each year. Many of them drink tea on at least eight different occasions during the day.

The working people of Britain have had a long tradition of democracy, not so much in the sense of creating formal institutions, but in the active sense of popular cooperation to uphold the will of the people.

T E X T 4

THE ENGLISH CHARACTER

(Serious approach)

The national character of the English has been very differently described over one quality, which they describe as fatuous self-satisfaction, serene sense of superiority, or insular pride. English patriotism is based on a deep sense of security. Englishmen as individuals may have been insecure, threatened with the loss of a job, unsure of themselves, or unhappy in many ways; but as a nation they have been for centuries secure, serene in their national success. They have not lived in a state of hatred of their neighbors as the Frenchmen or the Germans have often lived. This national sense of security, hardly threatened by the Armada, or by Napoleon, or by the First World War, has been greatly weakened by the Second World War and by the innovation of the atomic bomb.

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