weapons. If it were my task, Myr. Chairman, to teach children de- linqueney, to tell them how to rape and seduce girls, how to hurt people, how to break into stores, how to cheat, how to forge, how to do any known crime, if it were my task to teach that, 1 would have to enlist the evime comic book industry.
Formerly to impair the morals of a minor was a punishable offense. It has now become a mass industry, J will say that every crime of de- linqueney is deseribed in detail and that if you teach somebody the technique of something you, of course, seduce him inte it.
Nobody would believe that you teach a boy homosexuality without introducing him to it. The same thing with crime.
For instance, I] had no idea how one would go abont stealing from a locker in Grand Central, but T have comic books which describe that in sninute detail and T could go ont now and do it.
Now, children who read that, it is just human, are, of course, tempted to do it and they have done it. You see, there is an imteraction be- tween the stories and the advertisements. Alany, many comic books have advertisements of all kinds of weapons, really dangerous ones, like .22 caliber rifles or throwing knives, throwing daggers; and if a hoy, for instance, in a comic book sees a girl like this being whipped and the man who does it looks very satisfied and on the last page there isan advertisement of a whip with a hard liandle, surely the maximum of i ian is given to this boy, at least to have fantasies about these things.
I€ is iny conviction that if these comic books eo te as many millions of children as they vo to, that among all these people who have these fantasies, there are some of them who carry that out in action.
Mr. Beaser. Doctor, may T interrupt you just a moment to go back to your Grand Central story?
Assume that is read by an otherwise healthy. normal chile, with a good homelife, no other factors involved—woull you say that that would tempt him to go and break into a locker in Grand Central. or must there be other factors present already to give him a predispasi- tion to steal from somebody else?
Dr. Wertham. I would answer that this way: I know of no more erroneous theory about child behavior than to assume that children must be predisposed to do anything wrong. I think there is a hair- line which separates a boy who dreams about that, dreams about such a thing, and the boy who does it.
Now, I don't say, and I have never said, and L don't believe it, that the comic-book factor alone makes a child do anything.
You see, the comic-book factor only works because there are many, many other factors in our environment, not necessarily the homelife, not necessarily the much-blamed mother, but there are many other things; the other boys in school, the newspaper headlines where every- body accuses the other one of being a liar or thief.
There are many, many other factors in our lives, you see.
Now, actually, the answer should be put in this way: In most cases this factor works with other factors, but there are many cases that 1 know where such crimes have been committed purely as imitation and would have never been committed if the child hadn't known this technique.
In other words, I want to stress for you what we have found, that the temptation, and, of course, we know it from our ordinary lives—
