©Adobe Stock

Prosecutors are facing an unprecedented boom in sexual assaults. An influx which is the consequence of the liberation of speech initiated, in particular, by the MeToo or Balance your bar movements, but also of the work of the new Centers for the management of sexual violence (CPVS) which are gradually opening their doors in all four corners. from Belgium. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of reports for acts of morals drawn up by the police thus jumped by more than 20%, quotes The Echo. The filing of complaints is increasing and the repression is intended to be more and more severe. Led by the Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open VLD), a bill to reform the sexual criminal code (which places the notion of consent at its center) aims to increase the penalties. The viol would thus go from an encouraged maximum sentence of 5 to 10 years in prison. So many reassuring news? Belgian society, still too mired in sexism and patriarchy, would it finally take the evil to the root?

Nothing is less sure. For many lawyers and criminologists, our country is on the contrary far too punitive. Sorry? Are we now sending too many rapists and other sexual aggressors to court? “The susceptible person is very naive if he thinks that young people are going to read the Penal Code, declare a judge in the financial daily. As often, pushed in the back by the extreme right and the Poujadists, the policy calls for more repression, but it will not work.“Note that these experts obviously do not advocate the impunity of these perpetrators. They are just saying that these convictions will not solve the problem of sexual offending. Delphine Paci, of the International Observatory of Prisons (OIP), agrees. “Instead of initiating real prevention policies, giving courses on the notion of consent or on respect for others, for example, we “over-penalize” these facts, the lawyer tells us. And by doing this, one can be sure that the perpetrators will never admit the facts because, if they do, they will prefer a criminal record. By using only the penal tool, the population may have the impression that we are solving the problem but, in reality, we are practically not touching this disabling phenomenon.”

A closed school, an open prison

For many observers, this extension of prison sentences for rapists does not make much sense. For Jean-François Funck, judge at the sentence enforcement court, conditional release would be the only valid formula for monitoring sex offenders. He even claims to have encountered practically no cases of recidivism within the framework of a therapeutic follow-up of these perpetrators of offences.

And this excessive penalization does not only affect acts of morality. It is even systemic. To understand the reasons, a little flashback is in order. During the potato crisis in the 19th century – mildew then ravaged crops and led to a great famine – there was terrible prison inflation. “Feeling insecure, especially food, the judges hit stronger sentences, prosecute Master Paci. Numerous studies in criminology, including the doctoral thesis by the Belgian Charlotte Vanneste, have shown that prison overcrowding increases in times of crisis. And this inflation is not linked to penal insecurity but to insecurity in terms of living conditions.“The current migration crisis also illustrates this phenomenon. “This is called “crimmigration”. As we do nothing upstream, we incarcerate. So when Iraqis, for example, arrive in Belgium, we end up with… Iraqi prisoners. These undocumented migrants will be imprisoned for often very minor offences, such as the theft of wallets at McDonald’s, for example, when the perpetrators of these facts are not condemned as severely in normal times. The prison thus becomes the receptacle of social problems. Same logic with sexual offending.”

It is even one of the great paradoxes of our society. The number of offenses recorded by police statistics has been declining for years, criminal convictions (conventional or alternative prison sentences), they do not decrease. Despite the use of electronic surveillance, prison overcrowding has even worsened. We incarcerate less but we sentenced to longer sentences. If there were approximately 5,000 prisoners in Belgian prisons in 1980, there are thus more than 10,000 today. A figure that has exploded, even taking into account the demographic evolution of Belgium. Proof that our politicians have still not understood the need to strengthen crime prevention. If we attribute it – probably to an offense – to Victor Hugo, the aphorism “When we open a school, we avoid, twenty years later, opening a prison” dates well from the 19th century. It is therefore high time to put it into practice. Finally, let us quote a last figure to reinforce the ultra-limited impact of the increase in trials on crime. With all the means at its disposal, our penal system does not even apprehend 1% of the commission of delinquency in Belgium.