Accused of infanticide: Criminal prosecutions of the deliberate killing of a new-born child in the Belgian province of West Flanders, 1796-1867

Abstract

Summary

In Belgium, from 1796 until 1867, infanticide was a crime which was legally defined as the deliberate homicide of a new-born child and punished with the death penalty. In the province of West Flanders, for a long time the second most populous province in Belgium, this crime was strongly women-related. As in the other Belgian provinces and abroad, this crime was mainly committed by unmarried domestic servants who lived with their employer and with whom there was no time nor a place for a mother with a child. Infanticide was a crime that was prosecuted before the Court of Assizes of West Flanders and its predecessors. Such prosecutions happened rather exceptionally (109 people in all were prosecuted in West Flanders over a period of 70 years, i.e. an average of 1.5 per year), albeit in a steadily increasing line and with a peak during the years 1850-1867. The Court of Assizes punished this crime only very exceptionally with the statutory death penalty (only in 34 cases, i.e. 31% of the 109 accused). The other 75 accused were either acquitted (58 cases, i.e. 53% of the accused) or punished for another offence (17 cases, i.e. 15.5% of the accused). The acquittals and the punishments for another offence were not the result of the jurors’ or professional judges’ inclination to accept the puerperal insanity of the accused women, but a consequence of the fact that it was exceedingly difficult to prove that a child had been born viable, had lived independently of the mother for a while, and had been killed with the clear intention of killing it, when the child’s mother had given birth without assistance and claimed that the child had been still-born or died from a natural cause.