A triumph for the protectional model? How Belgian institutions for delinquent children dealt with young collaborators (1944-1950)

François, Aurore [UCL]

In 1912, after several years of heated discussions, Belgian legislators passed the country’s first child protection Act. This law set up juvenile courts, realizing a wish that had been expressed in the 19th century, to handle the cases of delinquent minors outside the penal system. From this point, children would not be judged as adults; the juvenile courts would be presided over by a single judge, who would be specially qualified for it. In agreement with the law, the juvenile judge attach more importance to the familial and personal status of the minor than to the acts he has committed. To carry out this evaluation, the judge resorts to a double expertise (still rudimentary, but with real capacities): social and medical-pedagogical inquiries. The ordeals of wars marked the functioning of these courts, in consecrating the “protectional” ambitions of the law: juvenile judges are not just interested in youths who have committed an infraction listed in the penal code, but also in those who adopt a behavior that is dangerous for themselves or society. The repression of prostitution or vagrancy among young people, perceived as schools of vice and crime, are perfect illustrations of the prophylactic ambitions of the courts, just like the possibility offered to parents to denounce the indiscipline of their own children, and require their confinement in a specialized institution. During WWII, the occupation, and particularly the grave economic and food crisis raging at the time very rapidly led to a multiplication of the number of cases to be dealt with: double that of peacetime, and that despite the organizational difficulties involved. The end of the Second World War was also marked by the settling of collaboration affairs involving minors. Specific quarters, reserved for minor collaborators, were established in some institutions for young delinquents. But judges and eventually institutions themselves had a hard time figuring out how to treat minors who had collaborated, many having come from “respectable” families, with the exception of political aspects. This paper proposes to examine this short―but intense—part of child protection history from different points of view. To begin with, the specific measures taken by the Belgian government regarding minor collaborators: were these measures in line with the protectional model, which valued quality of the family environment over the offences committed by the youth, taking the risk not to meet the social demand for a severe repression? To what extent uncivil acts committed by some youth and the antipatriotic family atmosphere were felt as major educational issues? What were the available means for reeducating young offenders in the institutions for young delinquents? Lastly, how did the reeducational establishments and their staff handle this specific population, which strongly differed from those usually frequenting juvenile courts?