Van Stokkom endorses Pattyn’s criticism of principled ethics. It is more convincing to view ethics as a way to understand moral practices and moral experiences. For example, the ethical value of restorative justice practices resides in moral communication in which the participants strive for recognition. Nevertheless, Pattyn does not notice that moral justifications often rely on ethical principles. When we must make choices or introduce new policies, we often cannot escape justifications that fit in with ethical principles. Nevertheless, these principles may also paralyze or polarize discussions. In populist times – with its punitive rhetoric – it seems wise to keep public discussion at bay from ‘high restorative principles’ such as the ‘superfluity of punishment’ and concentrate on the narrative power of restorative justice practices.

The author advises the protagonists of restorative justice to become less paradigmatic and more pragmatic in their approach of criminal justice and victims needs and interests. The offer of a restorative procedure is not suitable for all victims, nor for all thinkable moments after the event of a crime. Tailoring is needed to make each victim the best offer, and the utility of restorative justice is important, but limited. The author believes that much of the restorative justice literature is aiming at proving the superiority of restorative justice practices above any other type of intervention or service, and he feels that this is partly why restorative justice has not been well received in the Netherlands. A piecemeal implementation of mediation and conferencing in the sphere of criminal justice might be served by being less paradigmatic.

Victim-offender-mediation started in Belgium as early as 1993 and nowadays the Belgium landscape shows a variety of restorative practices, including conferencing with juveniles and mediation with adult offenders, on the basis of a number of legal arrangements. Progress can still be made in quantitative terms and qualitatively by harmonizing the various legal instruments that are available. The diversionary mediation that is possible at the level of the public prosecutor differs in a number of ways from the mediation that can be offered in subsequent stages of the criminal procedure. A variety of motives and reasons explain the reception and growth of restorative practices, such as the desire to offer victims a better service and to improve the delivery of justice. The willingness to experiment and to collaborate between protagonists of restorative justice and the agencies of criminal justice, and the strong scientific support from the Catholic University of Leuven, are amongst the key factors that promoted the integration and consolidation of restorative practices in the legal system.

Blad responds to Groenhuijsen by showing how political decisions in the Netherlands, after successful experiments with restorative justice for juveniles and adults, were based on the belief that criminal justice would lose its punitive foundation and tenor when restorative justice practices would become integrated in the justice system. Criminal justice should not be about resolving conflicts between victims and offenders and the type of mediation, that could lead to an agreement as an important element to be considered in sentencing, was therefore rejected. In so far as restorative justice ideology took influence, it seems to have been a misconception of restorative justice as merely a new form of penal abolitionism. The fact that restorative justice does not deny the legitimacy of the provisions in the substantive criminal law and that all important restorative projects co-operate with criminal justice agencies was apparently ignored. Against the background of the dominant political culture of ‘punitive populism’ and intensified use of severe punishments it seems highly unlikely that abandoning the ambition to develop a restorative justice paradigm would further the implementation of restorative justice.

White-collar crime is mostly committed by men. It remains to be seen if this will stay this way. Increasing numbers of women succeed in attaining management positions in organizations. Could we therefore expect an increase in female white-collar crime?Criminological theories on female crime and on white-collar crime lead to contradicting hypotheses.Research on white-collar and organizational crime predominantly produces a situational hypothesis explanation according to which we could expect that the rise of women in organizational hierarchies will also bring more female white-collar crime.Research on female delinquency might lead to an opposite gender-difference hypothesis that would predict less white-collar crime, because they have a lesser tendency to show risky behavior.In this article, both assumptions will be elaborated for further research, against the background of possible gender bias in the relation between women and white-collar crime.

The backgrounds of the female vagabonds and beggars at the end of the 19th century show that contrary to their male counterparts, these females originated almost exclusively from the lower echelons of society. Their professions and those of their parents and husbands were low and ill-paid. Disease was prevalent, mortality was high and many of them had physical or psychological problems. Most of them were single and 25 percent had children out of wedlock. 20 Percent was convicted for mostly minor crimes. Because of their behaviour it is likely that they were not accepted by their family and received no support from the church or other institutions for relief of the poor. To beg and get convicted to RWI-placement may have been their only remaining survival strategy once they were old and ill.

This special issue focuses on the role of sex/gender in Dutch and Belgian criminological and penological research and theory. This introductory article draws the history of thought and research within Dutch-language criminology and explores international developments, in particular the influence of feminist critique on theory and research.This framework serves the positioning of the other contributions, on the one hand research exploring the differences in crime between men and women and on the other hand empirical and theoretical articles focusing on (the social construction of) gender. Finally some innovative methodological findings will be discussed, also with regard to future criminological research.

Over 700 students judged fictitious descriptions of court cases, in which the gender of the offender was systematically varied, as well as a number of aspects pertinent to theories that explain disparities in sentencing between females and males. The results show that females indeed received shorter sentences than males, and that this difference could be attributed to the fact that male student-judges gave women shorter sentences and differential sentencing for violent crimes. We found mixed support for the chivalry as well as for the perceptual shorthand theory. More research is needed, in more realistic settings, to explain gender differences in sentencing.

Rape drugs (or drink spiking) discourse reflects gender stereotypes in a much more differentiated way than previous studies suppose. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of news items and online discussions proved stereotypes of ideal female victims and male perpetrators to be most prominent in news media. Postings to online bulletin boards were more skeptical about the alleged victims’ innocence and truthfulness. Studies in this area that focus on news media and institutional discourse overestimate the predominance of the ideal victim stereotype. In order to correct this bias, the authors urge criminologists to be more attentive to the relevance and power of informal crime stories and discussions, particularly those appearing in social media.

In this article, an ongoing Flemish qualitative research on life histories and criminal careers of women in prison is discussed. We conducted autobiographical interviews with 40 female prisoners aged between 20 and 69 years. Considering our target group, we didn’t always succeed in conducting an autobiographical interview. In practice we often conducted a classic open in-depth interview. By means of file analysis, we reconstituted the criminal career of every interviewed woman. Thanks to the retrospective approach we could reveal a diversity of trajectories. We identified three pathways: (1) youth offenders, (2) early adult-onset offenders and (3) late adult-onset offenders. Remarkably, quite a lot of women are late starters. Three risk factors – to a greater or lesser extent – play a role in these pathways: a problematic educational situation in childhood, drugs and negative love affairs.

Gender, in criminological research, often refers to women. Although ‘masculinities’ and crime have been intertwined internationally for more than two decades, this isn’t so for Dutch research. Based on this international critique, this article introduces the masculinities approach in Dutch penology. Prisons are generally considered as hypermasculine settings (Toch, 1998), but this hypothesis is seldom explored within a gender framework. Nevertheless, ‘doing masculinity’ is an important coping strategy for male prisoners (Jewkes, 2005). This gap is tackled on two levels: (1) the conceptualization of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and (2) a critical, masculinity-oriented analysis of the existing knowledge on prison life, prison culture and prison hierarchy. It aims to tackle prison masculinity stereotypes, since traditional penal insights aren’t necessarily valid from a gender point of view (Evans & Wallace, 2008). Therefore, we conclude by analyzing the value of masculinity studies for penology.

Two explanations can be found for the unequal geographical concentrations of avoidance behaviour: (1) the demographic composition of residential areas, and (2) the social and structural contextual effects of residential areas. Different studies all over the world have shown that women report more fear of crime than men. In this article we study contextual as well as individual determinants of avoidance behaviour for men and women separately to gain a better insight in the explanation of individual differences in avoidance behaviour. The theoretical framework of this study is derived from the collective efficacy theory. In the present study a contextual model was tested on a 2009 survey of 2,080 residents from 40 municipalities in Flanders (Belgium), by using block-wise multilevel analyses on data from the Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders Survey (SCIF-survey), the Security Monitor and the registered crime statistics. The results indicate that economic disadvantage in the residential area increases the risk on avoidance behaviour both for men and women, because these areas often have high disorder and violent crime rates. With regard to the social ecology of crime this study shows that more research is needed on the differences in contextual effects of structural area characteristics on avoidance behaviour.

The Netherlands fire safety regulations require certain types of buildings to have a direct connection between the building fire alarm system and the dispatch centre of the fire brigade. These automatic fire alarm systems are mandatory for example in premises where inhabitants such as small children or elderly people have limited self-evacuation capabilites in case of fire. These automatic fire alarms aim at saving lives by a faster response of the fire brigade. However, the fast majority of these automatic alarms are false. As a result these calls constitute a considerable and undesirable drain on the fire brigade resources. These calls cause unwanted direct costs (salaries) and indirect costs (road accidents due to fire brigade mobilisation) apart from the regular maintenance costs. Up to now no data is available for the costs and benefits of the system of automatic fire alarms. This article describes the results of a study of the automatic fire alarm system in the region Twente. The yearly social costs are calculated at about € 3 million. In order to calculate the benefits all incident reports from automatic fire alarms during a period of 29 months have been investigated. In this period no call form an automatic fire alarm system has occured in which the fire brigade had to deploy its resources for a live saving or evacuation action.

Unlike the physical abusers of children, little is known about downloaders of child pornography. The key questions in this article are: who are the downloaders, what are their backgrounds, why and how they download child pornography, how they behave offline and online and what types of downloaders can be distinguished? A simple answer to these questions is currently impossible to give. There is more, preferably longitudinal, research needed on risk factors for downloading child pornography and the various types of downloaders. Combating the downloaders requires a lot of the police in terms of international cooperation and up to date knowledge and expertise. This also served the treatment practices, which is partly dependent on a properly conducted police investigation.