
Els Dumortier is professor in Criminology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is a founding and board member of the (Flemish) Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre. She also is an active member of the European Council for Juvenile Justice and the Working Group on Juvenile Justice at the European Society of Criminology. Her research specifically focuses on questions concerning youth justice and children’s rights in practice. Currently, her work focuses on: 1) police interrogations of juvenile offenders and how children’s rights play a role in these practices, 2) youth justice trajectories and the experiences of those trajectories by the people involved, 3) children’s right to complain in youth institutions, 4) child victims of institutional abuse and 5) voicing youth at social risk.