ABSTRACT
THE stereotype is invariably misleading, and among delinquents and criminals it is in some ways harder to establish the basis of such a generalisation when the characteristic they have in common, the fact of having broken the law, is often no more than a facade behind which lies an infinite variety of motivation, personality and circumstance. Much of the justification for the sociological study of anti-social or deviant behaviour lies in the fact that the actions of individuals go to make up trends which can be studied as objectively as natural phenomena, quite independently of specific motivations. In this way it can be demonstrated that delinquency is related to the facts of social class, to age, to sex, to the extent of urbanisation and so on. But it remains that the delinquent is nevertheless an individual whose behaviour is a response to a complex set of stimuli from both without and within himself, whose personality has unique elements which separate him out from his fellows. It is surely due to the unique quality of the individual human personality that some break the law while others do not, in circumstances which press equally heavily upon every member of a family or social group.
