Juvenile Delinquency, War and the Food Crisis : a Judicial Response to Delinquent Subsistence Strategies (Belgium, 1914-1918)

François, Aurore [UCL]

Economic crises, and particularly those inherent to war situations, represent privileged moments for understanding the functioning of regulatory institutions often obliged to redefine their priorities and constrained to adapt their functioning to the urgencies certain situations demand. Just barely installed by the law of May 15th, 1912, the juvenile courts found themselves confronted with a transformation of the juvenile delinquency reported. Clearly and directly linked to subsistence, this wartime specificity testified to the economic vulnerability of the authors of offences, as well as to that of their victims. This contribution proposes examining these jurisdictions, in direct contact with families plunged into poverty, precisely from the angle of the judicial response made to behaviours more or less directly related to the crisis of subsistence: pilfering, gleanings, theft, vagrancy and begging. During the war and in the immediate post-war period, these actors in child protection provided a well delineated analysis of the delinquency of subsistence, exhibiting a relative degree of tolerance of theft while firmly condemning begging, and a fortiori when it formed part of a family strategy. Thus the evaluation of these various behaviours, as well as of the families implementing them in more or less strategic manner reveals, on the part of the actors in the judicial protection of children, a relatively complex interpretation of the contexts of war and economic crisis, as well as their effects on juvenile delinquency and, more generally, on the morality of families.