This text is part of the special Acfas awards
For 20 years, Céline Bellot has cared about issues that affect marginalized people. The one who left France for Quebec in 1993 won this week the Acfas Pierre-Dansereau prize for social engagement.
It is with humility that the professor at the School of Social Work of the University of Montreal received this distinction. “It’s recognition, but there are plenty of other people who do like me. Why me, and not others? She asked herself, laughing.
“I always believed that what I did was the right thing to do,” she adds. She also insists on the work of her colleagues, partners and students who have worked with her in all the research she has carried out.
The Acfas Prize recognizes the excellence of its work which consists in analyzing and finding institutional policies and practices that contribute to the stigmatization of the most vulnerable. His research first looked at people experiencing homelessness.
At the time, homeless people could face a jail sentence if they did not pay their tickets. “It was to wonder why we have penal answers rather than social ones? Homelessness is not a crime, it is not a disease, ”she emphasizes. In June 2020, the Quebec government finally adopted a law abolishing imprisonment for such a reason.
Over the years, her work has led her to also focus on people struggling with drug use and Aboriginal youth. Cumulating initiatives, she has, among other things, directed around twenty research projects and in 2015 even co-created the very first graduate course devoted to homelessness in Quebec. His portrait of the judicialization of Indigenous people experiencing homelessness in Val-d’Or was also one of the triggers of the Viens commission.
Have an overview
Arrived in Quebec to study criminology, she believes today that she is the lawyer she wanted to become at the age of six. “Even if it’s not in a dress and even if it’s not in a legal arena,” she says of her fight against social injustices. And that’s what I do. “
Graduated in law, criminology and sociology, Mme Bellot is of the opinion that his multidisciplinary experience allows him to have “a good reading and a broad understanding of things”.
The one who says she is endowed with a natural optimism also notices improvements in practices over the years. “When we started our studies, the problem was homeless people,” she says. She observes that today, the various government authorities rather see the judicialization as being the question to be tackled. “Obviously, there are still problems and too many tickets being handed in. But there is still a recognition that the criminal route in homelessness is not the right one, ”she specifies.
And if racial and social profiling is still present in 2021, these themes are more part of the public debate than at the time, underlines the researcher. “The solutions are not yet fully implemented, but at least these issues are on the agenda. “