Wrapping up 2023, a multi part series, looking at the universality of states deliberate failure in the face of child sexual abuse. This second part covers Belgium. To come: United Kingdom, France, and European institutions.
Belgian Child Sexual Abuse in 2023
The public prosecutor
Three times during the course of a year the Belgian courts followed the Belgian prosecutor’s demand to not investigate child sexual abuse and international child trafficking. Three times on different grounds.
The first time the excuse was “too much evidence”. You are not dreaming, and reading that right. Too much evidence of child abuse led the Belgian public prosecutor to ask the Belgian courts to decide he should not even look at the evidence submitted. The argument was because there is too much evidence it would be a waste of state ressources. No this is not a belated April’s fools prank, but hard reality.
Then the Belgian minister of internal affairs met with her Swiss justice colleague, officially to “discuss close collaboration on organised crime”.
Subsequently, in appeal, the court dismissed the case because the evidence had been left available to be consulted electronically by the parties for one day too many. Someone at the public prosecutor’s office had forgotten to turn off the access, or has inputted the wrong date. The evidence had been left available for one day too many, and that was grounds for the courts to decide the prosecutor did not have to investigate.
Finally, cherry on the cake, the third time the judge decided in December that when there is a possibility child sexual abuse is also committed against Belgian children while on “holiday”, the public prosecutor should not investigate any evidence. And when subsequently to filing criminal complaints with evidence the victim children are trafficked by the perpetrators, as to ensure they are harder to prosecute, the public prosecutor should also not investigate the evidence.
The fourth power
It was a mixed batch this year.
Belgian journalists found themselves publishing child sexual abuse stories in the Dutch and Spanish media because publishing in Belgium got censored by Belgian media CEO’s on third party request.
But at the same time, a multi part series called “Godvergeten“ on the disgusting practise of child sexual abuse and its handling in Belgium was aired in September. It was commissioned and paid by the Belgian public broadcasting corporation.
The documentary created such havoc and upheaval in the country that not one but two parliamentary commissions were called. A Belgian Federal parliamentary Investigative commission and a Flemish parliamentary Special Commission.
The parliamentary commissions
Belgium is at its third round of child sexual abuse commissions in as many decades. Naturally, the commissions received reports.
NGO’s and journalists laid their ears to listen, and reported back parliamentarians have “no appetite” to truly investigate.
It came as no surprise when the commissions commissioned the Belgian Federal Ombudsman to collect and filter testimonies and reports. The commissions had previously received a report about how the Belgian Federal Ombudsman violated international law and blocked the Federal Institute for the protection and promotion of Human Rights to assist Human Rights Defenders who as a consequence of working on child sexual abuse cases are under intensive SLAPP’s, transnational repression, retaliation and persecution.
Parliamentarians have time till end March to turn the tide and take it seriously, but given there is “no appetite” one should not hold high hopes.
A glimpse into the future
You know there is a fundamental problematic dealing with child sexual abuse when the:
- parliament allegedly investigates child sexual abuse;
- but at the same time give power to a body known and documented to dismiss those who speak up against child abuse;
- and prosecutors at the same time ask the courts to be allowed to not even look at evidence of child sexual abuse and child trafficking;
- and courts decide prosecutors should not investigate evidence
While the commissions have time until March to turn the tide and start being serious about the highly necessary task they set out to undertake, I sadly expect new child abuse commissions to have to be called in the next decade.
Every parent should be knowledgeable about factual child-development science so that they’re more enabled to rear their children in a more psychologically functional and sound manner.
Therefore, I believe, high-school students should be educated for the most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless. Understanding the science behind every child’s healthy/functional development can at least enable a prospective parent to make an educated decision on how they wish to go about rearing any future children.
If nothing else, child-development science curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.
Since so much of our lifelong health comes from our childhood experiences, childhood mental health-care should generate as much societal concern and government funding as does physical health, even though psychological illness/dysfunction is typically not immediately visually observable.
Meanwhile, people will procreate, some prolifically even, regardless of their questionable ability to raise their children in a psychologically functional/healthy manner. I sometimes wonder how much immense long-term suffering might have been avoided had these people received mandatory child-development science curriculum as high-school students.
After all, dysfunctional and/or abusive parents may not have had the chance to be anything else due to their lack of such education and their own dysfunctional/abusive rearing as children.
Still, in the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal it’s written that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
Regarding early life or adverse childhood experience trauma, people tend to know (perhaps commonsensically) that they should not loudly quarrel when, for instance, a baby is in the next room; however, do they know about the intricacies of why not? Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby stuck in a crib on its back hearing parental discord in the next room can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123).
This causes its brain to improperly develop. It’s like a form of non-physical-impact brain damage. Also, it is the unpredictability of a stressor, and not the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg.42).
Furthermore, how many of us were aware that, since young children completely rely on their parents for protection and sustenance, they will understandably stress over having their parents angry at them for prolonged periods of time? It makes me question the wisdom of punishing children by sending them to their room without dinner.
Yet, general society perceives and treats human procreative ‘rights’ as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
Meantime, in protest to newly mandated elementary school curriculum that teaches something undoubtedly controversial, a picket sign read, “We don’t co-parent with the government”. But maybe a lot of incompetent yet procreative parents nowadays should.
Mindlessly ‘minding our own business’ often proves humanly devastating. Yet, owing to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or ‘What is in it for me, the taxpayer, if I support social programs for other people’s troubled families?’
While some people will justify it as a normal thus moral human evolutionary function, the self-serving OIIIMOBY can debilitate social progress, even when social progress is most needed. And it seems this distinct form of societal penny wisdom but pound foolishness is a very unfortunate human characteristic that’s likely with us to stay.
But as a moral rule, a physically and mentally sound future should be every child’s fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter. And the health of all children needs to be of real importance to everyone — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.
Though it’s only for the month of April, every day of the year should be Child Abuse Prevention Month in this world.
___________
“It’s only after children have been discovered to be severely battered that their parents are forced to take a childrearing course as a condition of regaining custody. That’s much like requiring no license or driver’s ed[ucation] to drive a car, then waiting until drivers injure or kill someone before demanding that they learn how to drive.”
—Myriam Miedzian, Ph.D.
“The way a society functions is a reflection of the childrearing practices of that society. Today we reap what we have sown. Despite the well-documented critical nature of early life experiences, we dedicate few resources to this time of life. We do not educate our children about child development, parenting, or the impact of neglect and trauma on children.”
—Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Ph.D. & Dr. John Marcellus
“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.”
—Childhood Disrupted, pg.228