International studies show that children of teenage mothers are at elevated risk for offending. This study investigates the effect of early and late parenthood of mothers and fathers on offspring delinquency. The results confirm results from earlier studies and show that early fatherhood does not add to offending risk over and above early motherhood. Factors like family instability, family size and parental delinquency do not account for the association between early motherhood and delinquency. The elevated risk of offending applies to all children of young mothers, not just to the first-born children. Late parenthood is not associated with offspring delinquency.

Considerable political pressure is currently being brought to impose severe punishments, and it is frequently suggested that these punishments would enhance the wellbeing of victims and achieve ‘closure’. Populist images, such as ‘victims have a right to revenge’ have gained great influence. To what extent would therapeutic professionals have to support victim needs that are shaped within such punitive contexts? In this paper it is first argued that revenge embraces ambivalent meanings. Although avengers are lauded in the popular imagination, feelings of revenge are still viewed as ethically unacceptable. In recent decades, however, a penal populism has been gaining ground as a result of which revenge was stripped of its pejorative associations. In a punitive climate it is believed that victims would demand harsher penalties and that such penalties would promote closure and peace. Research findings show however that revenge may bring temporary relief, but anger rumination precludes healing. Subsequently the question is discussed whether two different forms of victim participation, victim impact statements and restorative justice conferences, might temper revenge feelings. Because VIS-participants (dealing with high levels of anger and fear) believe that their statements will culminate in longer sentences, they are generally frustrated that the imposed sentence is not tough enough. After the procedure they keep on viewing the offender as a malign person. Restorative procedures generally show an opposite picture. Finally this paper is criticizing the tendency of victim-oriented therapeutization within criminal justice and restorative justice. It is argued that the voice of the victim and the process of emotional healing should be separated strictly.

The tendency to revalorise emotions in the response to offending, seems to face a dilemma. On the one hand, experiencing crime and reacting to it inevitably are imbued by emotion. On the other hand, giving way to emotions in responding to crime entails the risks of disproportionate and unequal justice. This article argues that there is a fundamental difference between the emotions promoted to be included in the response to crime and the emotions feared as a risk to overwhelm good and proportionate jurisprudence. The first ones focus on the needs of the immediate stakeholders of the offence and seek their (re-)inclusion. The second type of emotions focuses on the criminal act and seeks to keep the threat it represents under control through punishment and incapacitation. It is a socio-ethical choice to promote the inclusionary approach. Whereas the rehabilitative approach has addressed the needs of the offenders only, the restorative tendency addresses the needs of both the victim and the offenders in a more balanced way. This balance also helps to avoid that respectful responses to crime degrade into norm erosion. The option for revalorising inclusionary emotions in the response to crime through restorative justice is located as a next phase in the civilisation process, described originally by Elias.

In this article attention is paid to the thoughts and feelings which underlie criminal law and restorative justice, as well as the question whether those thoughts and feelings have to be regarded as rational or irrational. For this purpose, the author has firstly examined the relationship between thinking and feeling from the perspective of the so-called cognitive emotion theory as put forth by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the Dutch philosopher Mirjam van Reijen. In addition, this contribution also addresses the ideas of the Stoics, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, since the aforementioned theory goes back on the ideas of these philosophers. These philosophers depart from the view on man and world in which interconnectedness plays an important role – as the opposite of separateness. This view which reflects the mystic-religious perspective on man and world forms an important connecting thread in this article, as this turns out to have direct consequences for the idea about the (ir)rationality of certain thoughts and feelings, as well as for the (ir)rationality of criminal law and restorative justice. Special attention is paid to emotions that are relevant within the context of criminal law and restorative justice – which include anger, resentment, hatred, fear and compassion. After having explained – on the basis of the cognitive emotion theory – how thinking and feeling relate to each other and which thoughts and feelings – on the basis of the perspective of interconnectedness – have to be considered as (ir)rational, the article examines whether punishment is (ir)rational and whether the regular theories which legitimate punishment (i.e. retribution and prevention theories) are ‘rationalities of something irrational’. Furthermore, it is assessed whether the thoughts and feelings behind restorative justice are (ir)rational. The article concludes with a suggestion in which the main findings of this contribution are summarized, in order to stimulate discussion.

Approaching the night as a particular time and space for secret transgressions, this article examines the nightlife of Antwerp youth in the early twentieth century. Although this period saw increased official attempts to legally regulate ‘immoral’ nocturnal juvenile amusements, the police allowed most young people to move around unbothered at night, intervening only in major public order disturbances and handling most juveniles informally. Parents were more ‘efficient’, filing complaints with the juvenile judge on charges of ‘misconduct’, seeking to end familial financial troubles caused by heavy spending on nightlife. Working-class youth increasingly turned to the movies and dancing, in search for a secret ‘second life’ of pleasures away from conventional social and sexual codes, where they could belong and feel special.

In 2011 it was revealed that the Dutch social-psychologist Diederik Stapel from Tilburg University faked his experiments and fabricated findings.Many of his PhD-students relied upon his statistical data and, as a result, their dissertations and publications have been qualified as fraudulent. Here I wilI focus mainly on gaining access to the PhD-students. I show that trust and distrust played an essential part in the communication with these respondents. Some of them state that the framing of Stapel as the evil mastermind is not coherent with their experience. They also define him as an enthusiastic and brilliant supervisor who was interested in their work.

This article examines the silence of control agents. It is often said that control agents as representatives of the risk society are obsessed with control activities and fact-finding, and that rule breakers are regularly exposed by negative publicity. The author takes the contrary position that even major cases demonstrate the persistence of silence on the part of control agents. He distinguishes between two types of silence: denial and secrecy. Denial means that control agents saw nothing while they could have discovered wrongdoing. He points to the fact that this denial in the face of knowledge is the result of sociological ambivalence: control agents are often forced to reconcile conflicting interests, which supersede the importance of supervision. The article shows that secrecy plays an important role in trust relationships between control agents and the objects of their supervision. Secrecy enables control agents to better obtain information. In effect, with regard to the supply of information and the scrutiny of the objects under supervision, control agents are dependent on the cooperativeness of the objects of supervision. These days, much emphasis is placed on breaking the walls of silence. Perpetrators, victims and witnesses, as well as control agents, are being encouraged to break the silence through the use of star witness arrangements, whistleblower arrangements, witness protection, and reporting centres. But is this effective? The author suggests that maintaining secrecy is essential and that those measures limit the space for control agents to develop trust relationships with the objects of supervision, and thereby the opportunity to engage in fact-finding.

In cultural criminology, we talk about crimes as secrets and secrets as crimes. There is a close relationship between criminality and secrecy. The unravelling of secrets can help us discover the meaning criminals attach to their actions and contacts. Secrets have always been a topical issue, as they are strongly embedded in our social world. Secrecy used to be functional in times of war and under dictatorships as a symbol of political and/or religious protest. Today, however, secrecy is most often associated with illegality and criminality. It is not easy to study secrets and secrecy, and for this reason criminological research requires specific, mainly ethnographic, research methods.

Kees Schuyt has written an extensive biography of the famous Dutch professor of criminology and literary polemicist of the 1960 in The Netherlands Willem Nagel. This colourful and controversial figure is dealt with as a fascinating mixture of Nagel’s life as lawyer, freedom fighter (against the German occupation during the Second World War), scientist and literary writer. Nagel’s original contribution to criminology is considered as somewhat less prominent than Schuyt would want to have it.

The political far right French Vichy-regime or French State (1940-1944) criminalized freemasonry as a dangerous secret society using several state owned measures. In the tradition of the secret Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory a legal framework was established to criminalize and ban freemasonry, to dissolve the lodges and to remove individual freemasons from command positions. Intellectuals, former freemasons, public and private police and intelligence agencies helped the regime to establish an anti-Masonic documentation, exhibition and movie (Forces occultes) in order to show the French population the danger of freemasonry. A specialized police force (Service des sociétés secrètes) identified 60.000 freemasons, the names of 18.000 were published and 3.000 lost their jobs. 989 were brought to the extermination camps and 545 were shot immediately by private militias.

André Köbben’s academic career spans sixty years and he’s still going strong – just because he likes it so much. Doing research by himself, which took him for longer periods to Ivory Coast and Surinam apart from studying conflicts in the Netherlands, but also analysing research by others. He has always been interested in questions of ‘rule’ and ‘reality’: the discrepancy between what people say they do and what they actually are doing. He probed tribal disputes among the Agni, the Bete and the Djoeka, but also conflicting interests between managers ordering research and researchers producing unwelcome results. He is preparing a book on academic fraud.

This article is directed towards two important lines of research in contemporary criminology, more specifically the growing attention for the period of young adulthood and the focus on the concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. This study examines in a quantitative manner the extent to which both ‘structure’ (operationalized in terms of social-economic status and objective transitions) and ‘agency’ (measured as the perception of personal agency and subjective transitions) are related to delinquency in the period of young adulthood. A representative sample of 1,477 Flemish young adults between the age of 18 and 25 years is used. The results of the analyses offer some empirical proof to integrate the concept of ‘agency’ in future theoretical models for the explanation of individual differences in delinquency and also lead to additional suggestions to further examine the interaction between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’.