From the impossible violence to the "behaviour trouble" : delinquent girls in the child guidance institutions in Belgium, from 1950 to 1970

Female violence has long been eclipsed in public discourses and representations by male misuse of force. This appears to be true especially in the case of youth behaviour: whereas brutality in boys was constitutive of their rising manliness, violence in girls was supposed to be impossible, or hidden. In accordance with their social status as subordinates, young women were not viewed as threatening social order. Therefore, when they rebelled, contemporary descriptions tended to “masculinize” those “viragoes”. The rise of Child Guidance institutions in the juvenile justice system triggered a new perception of female violence. If highly gendered, attributed to a sexual pathology called “erethism”, violence in girls nonetheless entered the aetiology of deviant behaviour, under the category of “behaviour trouble”. Highly normative, gender, age, race and class-biased, the dossiers of the Belgian child guidance clinics in the fifties and sixties nevertheless allow the historian to hear the voice of the inmates, whose violence appear to be a testimony of the self, and even a desire for social recognition, at a time of changing status of youth and women in western societies.