FROM STREET WALKING TO THE CONVENT: CHILD PROSTITUTION CASES JUDGED BY THE JUVENILE COURT OF BRUSSELS DURING WORLD WAR ONE

摘要

A decline in public morality regularly follows whenever a sizeable armed force is present among the population-this is a sociological phenomenon that invariably repeats itself. And only rarely has any invading army demonstrated worse moral character than the German army. Its lechery respected neither age, nor condition, nor gender. With these words, Paul Wets, the Juvenile Court Judge for Brussels, re-opened one of the most delicate questions that the Belgian justice administration had dealt with during the First World War: child prostitution. Of all the different types of cases which brought minors before this judge during the Great War, charges of prostitution probably accounted for the greatest number and gave rise to the most frequent, and the most difficult, contacts with the Germans. The question was particularly delicate because at the end of the nineteenth century Belgium had experienced what was an unprecedented child prostitution scandal at the time, the 'affair of the little English girls.