“They Won’t Do Anything with That.” A Legal–Empirical Perspective on the Right to Complain for Juveniles Deprived of Their Liberty (Flanders,2015–2024)

Abstract

Deprivation of liberty has historically been a common response to juvenile offending, but since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), it should be a measure of last resort. A key right in this context is the right to complain, which is crucial for making youth institutions more humane and child friendly. Despite this right to complain being recognized since more than three decades, research on how youths experience deprivation and how the complaint process functions, remains limited. This article first explores the legal significance of the right to complain for young people deprived of liberty, alongside the observation that, as with many other children’s rights, its implementation frequently falls short of expectations. Then, we present our research methodology, emphasizing the value of participatory observations and interviews conducted with professionals and young people directly engaged with the complaints process. Third, we report findings from our empirical study conducted in a Flemish youth institution in 2015 and 2016, before the introduction of a regulated complain mechanism. Fourth, we illustrate how the formal legal introduction of the right to complain at the end of 2017, alongside the mandated presence of monthly commissioners and a supervisory commission, significantly transformed the functioning of complaint procedures in closed youth facilities. Fifth, we reflect on the sudden impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the exercise of this right within youth facilities during 2020 and 2021 and the further evolution of this right until 2024. The article concludes by stressing the need for an empirically informed children’s rights perspective and calls for activist research to treat the right to complain as a “transformative right,” enabling systemic change in juvenile detention practices.