Gendered practices in the Belgian Juvenile Court? An analysis of the court records.

From a legal perspective, the Juvenile Court cannot make a tangible difference between girls and boys. Though, within the practice of the Juvenile Court different attitudes and perceptions seem to exist regarding these girls and boys. On the one hand, international and national research has indicated a persistence of controlling the sexual behaviour of girls, concerns that hardly exist towards boys. On the other hand, significant differences are found between girls and boys in the reporting documents of the court records. Although these findings suggest an alleged gendered orientation of the Juvenile Justice System, the presence of gendered practices in the Belgian Juvenile Court remains a relatively unexplored field.
Within our on-going research project, we analysed 80 closed Juvenile Court records, consisting of 40 records on girls and 40 records on boys, equally divided in criminal and status offenses. We investigated the role of gender in the reporting documents. In this paper, we first discuss the methodological and practical issues we encountered during the research period and secondly reflect on the first results of the document analysis. Our analysis indicates the existence of different trajectories and reveals an important influence of the intervention ground. Furthermore, it unveils a rather limited impact of gendered elements, a remarkable finding that requires further investigation.