LETTER FROM BENELUX

From the Central Planning Bureau to the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Scientific Research and Documentation Center, the Netherlands is fond of all kinds of analyses that decipher the workings of its society. And they sometimes reveal surprising trends, like the one highlighted at the beginning of September by a "Youth Crime Monitor," published by the Ministry of Justice.

The researchers detected a meteoric rise (42% in one year) in offenses committed by young girls, and the fact that all those involved (police, judges, public prosecutors, reintegration services, etc.) were far more lenient with them than with boys.

In 2022, some 17,500 crimes involving Dutch minors aged 12 to 18 were recorded in the kingdom. Among the perpetrators were 4,510 girls, 520 of whom were guilty of violence. The others were mainly involved in shoplifting, but also in scams, destruction and abuse. For thefts, the increase was truly striking: 70% in one year. However, statisticians themselves put this trend into perspective, considering that in 2021, many shops were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, making it challenging to steal anything from them.

Hence, caution was warranted, yet some newspapers promptly featured headlines like "new girl crime," possibly due to these statistics emerging shortly after a widely circulated incident in Zoetermeer, a town near The Hague, garnered significant attention on social media. The population, still unaccustomed to acts of this kind, discovered images of two boys and five girls, teenagers aged 14 and 15, violently beating up a younger victim. This prompted the city's mayor, Michiel Bezuijen, to speak of the birth of a "new phenomenon": violent gangs made up mainly of girls.

Undoubtedly, it's a somewhat premature assertion, but there is a discernible upward trend in teenage girls' involvement in crime in the country, and as per Anne-Marie Slotboom, widely regarded as the nation's foremost expert on the matter, this phenomenon continues to elude authorities to a considerable extent. "This is probably because girls are often less suspected and, consequently, less often worried," said the lawyer and criminologist from the Free University of Amsterdam. Moreover, when girls are arrested, the difference between what they confess and what they actually committed is much greater than when boys are confronted by police officers, Slotboom told the daily newspaper NRC on September 3.

She and her colleagues questioned all the departments dealing with young female offenders, asking them whether they felt they treated boys more harshly than girls. All of them answered "no" with great conviction, but their denials did not stand up to further analysis: "If you question them more deeply, you notice that unconsciously, they hold on to the prejudice that girls more rarely engage in delinquent acts," said Slotboom.

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