Christian Eliaerts

Survival of the Protection Model? Competing Goals in Belgian Juvenile Justice

Belgium is a small (with a surface of 32.545 km2) but well-situated country in the northwest of Europe. It consists of over 10 million citizens (10,396,421 on 1 January 2004) of whom 6 million live in the Northern, Dutch-speaking part (Flanders), almost 3.4 million in the Southern, mostly French-speaking part and close to 1 million in the region of Brussels (bilingual). As in other European countries, families in Belgium are becoming smaller and smaller. The fertility rate is 1.56 children per woman. So Belgium is faced with an aging population, 15% of whom are older than 65. The portion of juveniles (0–19 years) has diminished from 24.6% in 1990 to 22.4% in 2003 and the prognosis is a further decrease to 20.2% in 2021 (VRIND, 2003). On 1 January 2004 Belgium consisted of approximately 875,000 juveniles aged 12–17,1 almost half a million of them live in the Flemish region, more than 300,000 in the Walloon part and over 75,000 in the region of Brussels.2