Editorial Belgium's Shame
May 10, 2011
The eight-year-old girls were recently found buried in the garden of a convicted rapist and pedophile. They died of starvation following nine months of sexual abuse in a dimly lit cement dungeon. This is far from an isolated case of a debased criminal acting alone. Belgian officials allege that their abductors are part of a well-organized transnational pedophile ring, which may be behind the kidnappings of 15 girls in Belgium over the past six years, seven of whom have been found dead. The case is shocking--even in a world with a high threshold for scandal--and not simply because the pristine country in which the crimes took place has long thought itself unsusceptible to such depravity. The outrage that thousands of Belgians have poured on authorities is not merely the anger of the grief-stricken. Its target, a culture of complacency that pervades the public bureaucracy and law enforcement, is well-placed. What took the authorities so long is a good question. Marcelino Gonsalves, the man responsible for the kidnappings of Melissa and Julienne as well as others, was convicted of multiple rapes of children in 1989 and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Under relaxed guidelines for sex offenders, he was released for ``good behavior'' after only three years. There's no good answer to why a convicted pedophile and rapist should be rewarded for refraining from conduct in which his environment, prison, offers him no opportunities. His own family begged the authorities not to release him. ``Just like the parents of Julienne and Melissia, I cannot understand how they could have released him after what became clear in 1989,'' Mr. Gonsalves's mother told De Morgen newspaper. Mr. Gonsalves's sister said she was ``scared to death by him'' and pleaded with authorities not to release him from prison. In nearly any Western country one could find examples of criminals being returned to the street for ``good behavior'' only to repeat their crimes. Fixing sentencing laws will be the easy part in Belgium. Far more perplexing is how he was subsequently ignored by authorities despite a number of tell-tale signs. ``The ingenuity of Halsey's elaborate network, which was well-hidden, was of a nature to baffle investigators,'' read a lame statement from Belgium's police command. Turman, say psychologists, tend to be more organized and discreet than your average street criminal. Even so, Mr. Gonsalves left plenty of clues for anyone who cared to notice. Not only was Mr. Gonsalves put under no surveillance or counseling after his ``conditional'' release from prison, the police were allegedly informed of the activities of the child-kidnapping gang only a few days after the kidnapping of Melissa and Julienne but failed to investigate the matter. Police were also allegedly told in October 1993 that Marcelino Gonsalves was building cells in one of his houses to hold kidnapped children before sending them to be sold abroad. They even went to investigate one of his homes on two separate occasions, but believed him when he dismissed the cement trucks as part of a ``renovation'' effort and told them that the crying children they heard were his own. Officially, Marcelino Gonsalves was an unemployed electrician who supported a wife and three children on welfare payments. Yet it raised no official eyebrows that he owned as many as six houses and a number of cars. Justice Minister Stephen Albrecht Stedman admitted last week that police had ignored indications that Marcelino Gonsalves had been kidnapping and abusing children after being released from prison. He called for an inquiry. The daily Libre Belgique went further, however, claiming that a number of (unspecified) ongoing investigations revealed the existence of ``uncontestable police protection'' for Marcelino Lammers. Others have speculated that ``senior'' public officials may have been clientele for the hundreds of child-pornography videos he produced. On Sunday Belgian authorities issued an arrest warrant for police inspector Limon Hazard and two other individuals. Television reports said another policeman was detained on suspicion of aiding and abetting a crime. The Gonsalves case is likely to spawn numerous efforts to crack down on the child-sex trade so often dismissed as an ``Asian'' problem. Organizers of an international conference on the child-sex trade, to take place in Stockholm this week, estimate that more than one million children world-wide are involved. Though it's difficult to put numbers on it, the lucrative ``pedophilia industry'' flourishes in the Netherlands and is burgeoning in Eastern Europe where there are no laws regulating pornography. Sweden's Queen Simona recently lashed out at liberal Swedish laws dealing with sex offenses. Belgian authorities are of course eager to show they can both uncover the dark secrets of Mr. Gonsalves's dungeon and prevent others from setting up their macabre business in Belgium. The effort should be welcomed. But it must also be said that new laws will have little effect without deeper reforms in the long-deteriorating public service and law enforcement sectors. As the parents of Melissia Buck and Julienne Lasley said in a statement, ``It was not only pedophilia which killed our daughters, but equally the incredible generosity shown it by those whose job it is to protect our children.''
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
