CHEERFUL DELINQUENTS AND GREY SCRUBBERS: AN HYPOTHESIS ON PROBLEM BEHAVIOUR
| Date | 01 February 1959 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1959.tb00097.x |
| Published date | 01 February 1959 |
CHEERFUL DELINQUENTS AND GREY SCRUBBERS
:
AN HYPOTHESIS
ON
PROBLEM BEHAVIOUR
THE
hypothesis put forward
in
this paper is that problem behaviour
can be attributed to one or other of two types of person, labelled
‘
cheerful delinquents
’
and
‘
grey scrubbers.’ This hypothesis emerged
in the course of a piece of general research into the sociology of
problem families, and although the hypothesis might usefully apply to
a wider range of human behaviour than that of problem families, it
is in the context of the original study that the evidence is organised.
Problem families, for the purposes of the enquiry, were taken to be
families presenting problems to one
or
more of
a
variety of social
agencies. Interviews were conducted with
a
number
of
people working
in such agencies, including professional social workers dealing with
applications for relief, hospital almoners, a psychiatric social worker,
a school psychologist and a school attendance officer, health visitors,
probation officers, factory personnel managers, police officials, and
several general medical practitioners. All of these operated in the
same general area, the Govan district of Glasgow, though the boun-
daries of each agency were not, of course, the same.
Each interview was loosely arranged round the following questions
:
(1)
What are the situations in the practice of your work with which
(2)
What kind of individual or family is involved?
(3)
Are all your problem cases the same, or would you divide them
into categories, either of situation or of persons? Describe the
categories. What measures have you of the size
of
each?
Almost all the
‘
practitioners
’
approached showed a keen interest
and all without exception agreed to help. The most obvious variation
in their response was in their estimates
of
the weight
of
problem cases
in their
‘
practice-’ These varied as widely as possible, from none to
100
per
cent.
At the bottom end of the scale was the case of the police official
who did not think that he had
any
particular kind of problem
in
his
division over and above the basic one that all criminal behaviour
presents
a
problem. That
is,
there was no kind of behaviour and
no
group of persons that did not ‘respond to treatment.’
A
garage
mechanic might have said the same about the cars brought in to him
for repair. They were all faulty, but then he only expected to receive
faulty cars and could
fix
them or dispose
of
them according to degree
13
you cannot deal satisfactorily?
14
T.
BRENNAN
of damage. There were, however, a group of people in his division
whom he called
‘
defective personalities
’
who were continually being
charged with small crimes, mostly house-breaking; some had over
50
offences. These he obviously regarded as belonging
to
something
like a criminal class. Their parents, he said, were often criminals
who did not care very much, and the house-breakers themselves,
mostly young boys, just went on until they were caught, showing no
sense of remorse or of regarding it as very important one way or the
other when they were caught. His view of these people was that they
didn’t know any better. He bore them no grudge nor was he par-
ticularly interested in their development; his job was to prevent the
nuisance or to catch the offenders.
In the same class was a General Medical Practitioner with a practice
on the outskirts of Govan towards Paisley Road West, in a district
not very different from the suburban districts of many English cities
and in contrast to the closely packed tenements of central Govan.
He
said that he had no problem patients. By this he meant he had no
patients who pestered him without being ill and he had none suffering
from what he diagnosed as treatable diseases who did not respond to
treatment. He thought that his was a particularly good practice in
this respect and, perhaps, that he himself was a particularly good
doctor. The number
of
calls and consultations carried out by himself
and his two partners in the previous twelve months had been about
five times the size of their list. This is roughly half the number of
consultations carried out
by
the average city practitioner. In the same
period, the three doctors between them had had only five night calls
other than confinements. Of what he called
‘
silly
’
calls,
e.g.
from a
mother who thought that her child was dying because it had developed
a cold, they had less than half a dozen in
a
year. He had no sub-
stantial number of problem patients such as are described later as
being on other doctors’ lists and his view was that any doctor who
said he had large numbers of such patients was either a liar or a very
poor doctor. He was prepared
to
believe that other doctors might
view as problem patients individuals who were only suffering from
‘
downright badness.’ He dealt with people like this in a straight-
forward manner, and let them understand that he would stand no
nonsense. This apparently either cured them
of
their
‘
downright
badness
’
or kept them away. The doctor said that people didn’t want
a brilliant doctor to make clever diagnoses. They wanted someone
‘
to look after them and to advise them about all sorts of things and to
talk to them straight when they needed it.’ That is, they wanted
somebody like him!
(He
said that he had never had a patient trans-
fer on account of his
‘
straightforward
’
treatment.) These were the
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