De l'hystérie à la révolte : l'observation médico-pédagogique des jeunes délinquantes en Belgique (1912-1965)

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, hidden or pathological. In accordance with their social status as subordinates belonging to the so-called “private sphere”, young women were not viewed as threatening social order. The rise of Child Guidance institutions in the juvenile justice system triggered a new perception of female violence. Violence on the part of girls was considered highly gender-specific; as such it entered the aetiology of deviant behaviour, under the category of “behaviour trouble”. Highly normative, gender, age 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