Psycho-spiritual approach to develop protective factors in juvenile delinquents: an overview

Pages: 540-547
Pragya Sahare (Department of Clinical Psychology, Dev Sanskriti University, Haridwar Uttrakhand)
Anuradha Kotnala (Department of Clinical Psychology, Dev Sanskriti University, Haridwar Uttrakhand)

Growing cases of juvenile delinquency is a matter of great concern in a civilized society and cultural system in a country. Delinquency is one of the major problems for social disorganisation. Assuming that lack of resilience and conscience are major risk factors associated with criminal behaviour among children; present study aims at exploring the effectiveness of psychological and spiritual techniques in mounting the psychological resilience and conscience in juvenile delinquents. The assumptions of this theoretical study are (1) resilience and conscience function as protective factors in delinquency, (2) youth in trouble have strengths and are capable of becoming resilient and developing conscience and (3) spiritual augmented psychological methods can be major assets in building resilience and conscientiousness. For execution of this purpose some concerned books, journals and obtained literature after internet searches on PubMed, Medline, Medknow, Psycinfo etc. were reviewed. Qualitative and quantitative researches both were included and discussed in this article. This research suggests that spiritual techniques such as meditation, gayatri mantra merging up with cognitive approach are effective in fostering the protective factors such as resilience and conscience, at least in juvenile delinquents, by improving their spiritual understanding about life.