Too Good for Us? Evaluation, Court Practices and Civic (Re)Education of Young Belgian Collaborators after World War II

Since their creation in 1912, Belgian juvenile courts dealt every year with thousands of young people who committed an offence, or whose behaviour was perceived as threatening for themselves or for the whole society. If the judges had to establish the relevance of the facts when pronouncing a measure, their decisions were mainly inspired by the results of the social inquiries of the probation officers or by the reports of medico pedagogical evaluation centres, where children could be preventively placed. It is well known that the great majority of these young offenders came from working-class families, evaluated by the social workers in terms of hygiene, morality, education. But in the immediate post-War period, Belgian authorities, juvenile courts and reform schools had to deal with cases and children of a very different nature: youth (quite frequently from middle-class or wealthy families) who collaborated with the German enemy during the occupation. This paper aims to explore the reaction of the Belgian juvenile justice system to the unique nature of this phenomenon, questioning the motivations and the ability of his actors to challenge some tensions, especially between the political and the social dimensions in the evaluation and treatment of these youth, but also between the strong demand of revenge from the population and the ambitions of the protectional model.