Pourquoi les juges des enfants prononcent-ils si peu d’expertises ?

Abstract

What is the significance of this? Is it related to the view that justice and society presently have of children and adolescents? When a judge in a children's court has to be able to understand the personality of a parent and the subsequent repercussion on a child in danger, the pluridisciplinary investigation order, which is inherent to the educational assistance procedure, competes with the valuation. Conversely, the rare use of the valuation takes on a completely different meaning when a delinquent adolescent has to be judged; in a context of increased repression, it shows the interest that society and justice pay to the delinquent act itself, to the detriment of the personality of the adolescent. Furthermore, magistrates rarely order valuations to determine whether the adolescent acted with “discernment” and whether he/she should be penalised for his/her acts; thus reflecting the little attention that society pays on the status of the delinquent youth. Paradoxically, the systematic recourse of penal justice in the valuation of the credibility of a child, victim of sexual abuse, stems from the same procedure: judges prefer to ignore the extreme difficulty of judging a child's word, as though a valuation would be able to dispense them from arbitrating in the domain of what is “unthinkable” that constitutes the sexuality and traumatism experienced within the family sphere. Nevertheless, valuations allow one to understand what has built up between the child and his/her parents, not from the angle of the actual penal offence that is rape or physical violence but by striving to understand how the child's physical, sexual and mental integrity was denied. Such valuations would certainly contribute to the fact that process of judging, itself, would be able to give a new sense to life and teach the respect of others.