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.

中文翻译：

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被控杀婴：1796 年至 1867 年比利时西佛兰德省蓄意杀害一名新生儿的刑事诉讼

概括

在比利时，从 1796 年到 1867 年，杀婴是一种犯罪，法律上将其定义为蓄意杀害新生儿，并处以死刑。在西佛兰德斯省，长期以来，该省是比利时人口第二多的省份，这一犯罪与妇女密切相关。与比利时其他省份和国外一样，这种犯罪主要是由与雇主同住的未婚家庭佣人犯下的，没有时间也没有地方照顾带孩子的母亲。杀婴是在西佛兰德斯巡回法院及其前身受到起诉的罪行。这种起诉的发生相当罕见（在 70 年的时间里，西佛兰德斯总共有 109 人被起诉，即平均每年 1.5 人），尽管呈稳步上升趋势，并在 1850 年至 1867 年间达到顶峰。巡回法院仅在非常特殊的情况下才对这一罪行判处法定死刑（仅在 34 起案件中，即 109 名被告中的 31%）。其他 75 名被告人要么被判无罪（58 起，即被告人的 53%），要么因另一项罪行而受到惩罚（17 起，即被告人的 15.5%）。无罪释放和对另一项罪行的惩罚并不是陪审员或专业法官倾向于接受被告妇女产后精神错乱的结果，而是因为证明孩子已经出生极其困难这一事实的结果有生命力，曾经独立于母亲生活了一段时间，并且被杀害的目的很明确，