Police officers are often the victim of aggression by citizens, which has negative consequences for them and society in general. Therefore, it is important to gain knowledge about related factors. This study examines to what extent experiencing aggression as a police officer is related to their patience with citizens and use of force. Two explanations based on the victim-offender overlap are examined: that aggression experiences and dealing with citizens influence each other and that they have common causes. This study was conducted on the basis of a longitudinal questionnaire survey among police officers (N=693). The results show that interaction with citizens, including patience with citizens and the use of force, is related to the aggression police officers experience. The association diminishes when common causes, in this case socio-demographic and work-related characteristics, are taken into account, but does not disappear. No direct support is found for reciprocal influence. Implications and suggestions for further research are described.

Dutch prisons are not exempt from incidents. Despite the negative impact of violence on the safety of inmates and the chances of successful reintegration, not much is known about the prevalence of victimization in Dutch prisons and the characteristics of victims. Additionally, previous research has pointed out the overlap between victim status and offender status. In this contribution, the authors will discuss the prevalence of self-reported victimization among Dutch inmates and the characteristics of victims and victim-offenders. Data from 3,485 participants from the Life in Custody Study are used for this purpose.

#MeToo is a social movement that started on social media and spread from the US all over the world in 2017. The social movement behind #MeToo is characterised by publicly naming and shaming those who exhibit everyday misconduct in the workplace. This is done by spreading naming and shaming stories via Twitter messages. A question that arises here is whether naming and shaming is a suitable and successful tool for a political movement that aims to bring about social change with regard to sexual violence. Has #MeToo changed the social perspective on sexual violence and social norms of behaviour for sexual encounters? To answer these questions, first a historical sketch of the feminist movements against sexual violence will be provided. What is characteristic of these movements and what are possible parallels with the #MeToo movement? From a feminist perspective, are there any dilemmas that a judicial response to sexual violence entails? In order to provide background to these insights, the characteristics of the #MeToo movement, and the associated dilemmas surrounding naming and shaming, will be discussed next. Finally, it will be discussed if #MeToo has led to social changes.

This essay discusses green criminology in relation to the development of non-anthropocentric research perspectives in history and cultural anthropology. Green criminological concepts of ‘environmental harm’ and ‘ecocide’ turn doing harm to nature and ecosystems, even when legal, into object of criminological research. Historical research exploring a wider time frame deepens and enriches criminological understanding of, e.g., wildlife trafficking and climate change. According active agency to animals and other non-human actors and attempts to create a new language transcending human-nature dichotomies, as undertaken in transspecies or multispecies history, anthropology, and narratology, offer substantial contributions to green criminologies of everyday life.

Past and present human activity lies at the basis of the unprecedented environmental crisis we face today. This article explores the drivers and dynamics that are directly and indirectly responsible for the environmental crisis in the Anthropocene by using a green and organizational criminology perspective and combining it with insights from perpetrator studies. Responsible actors and responsibilities are discussed on societal, organizational and individual level. Lessons are drawn on how existing insights in criminology can be challenged to better accommodate for the ecological challenges in the antropocene and on what that means for criminologists experiencing and researching the Anthropocene.

Climate litigation is an understudied phenomenon in criminology. In this article we will discuss the rise of climate change litigation and growing recognition of global environmental harms from a green criminological perspective. More specifically, we will discuss both the legal reasoning and the impact of the Urgenda case in the Netherlands in the context of environmental, ecological and climate justice. We will conclude with how this case contributes for the recognition of diverse climate victims and strengthening of climate justice in the near future.

This article contains the results of a crime script analysis regarding the processes of human trafficking and human smuggling in Curaçao. The crime script analysis was conducted using data from five criminal investigations of human trafficking and seven criminal investigations of human smuggling. The results show that human trafficking in Curaçao consists of labor exploitation and sexual exploitation in bars, cafes and clubs. Young women are recruited from Colombia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic to work as waitresses, trago girls and/or prostitutes. Once they arrive on the island, the women are dependent on the perpetrators and are subjected to exploitation In this research, two types of human smuggling have been witnessed. The first type consists of Venezuelan smugglers who transport fellow Venezuelan nationals to Curaçao by boat in exchange for payment. The second type of smugglers are Curaçao locals who rent out rooms to Venezuelans that reside on the island illegally.

The media are a main source of information on crime for citizens. Prior research shows that media and fear of crime are not independent of each other. Since fake news is spread through (social) media, the question arises what the relationship is between (perceived) fake news and fear of crime. To date, no large-scale representative research has been conducted on this topic. This study is based on a representative population survey (n = 1566) from 2019. This exploratory study shows a small but significant relation between the perceived prevalence of fake news and fear of crime.

The current study investigates the relationship between the Dark Triad personality traits (consisting of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and three different forms of aggression: online aggression, overt aggression and relational aggression. The sample consisted of 1,051 adolescents between 12 and 16 years old. Results show that psychopathy and Machiavellianism are positive predictors of the three forms of aggression, while narcissism is a positive predictor of online aggression only.

This article adopts German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of “as if” as a vehicle to sketch the main features of the emerging research domain of narrative victimology, as well as address some of its limitations. Vaihinger emphasizes the importance of useful untruths, i.e. things we know to be untrue, but nevertheless behave as if they are not, if that strengthens their use as instruments for us to find our way more easily in the world. This applies to our daily lives, but also to our societal institutions and the models and metaphors that underlie our approaches to (social) science. The paper argues that the narrative metaphor of the historical event is often more apt to enhance our understanding of victimological phenomena than that of the mechanism, which is the default metaphor of (social) science. The paper subsequently describes four areas of inquiry of narrative victimology: victimisation’s impact on (life) stories; narratives in the aftermath of victimization; narratives of victim’s experiences with justice processes and the coincidence and juxtaposition of the victims’ narrative with narratives of other significant parties. For all its merits however, the narrative metaphor is also a “useful untruth”, equipped with its own limitations, for instance the difficulty of language in describing first hand experiences of victims and the possibility that narrative structures will be imposed upon victim experiences.

This article explores the intersection of two criminological perspectives—cultural criminology and narrative criminology. Taking inspiration from Mills and Fleetwood’s article, ‘Prepping and verstehen: A narrative criminological perspective’, where the authors contend that stories complement the pursuit of criminological verstehen, this article draws attention to other ways in which cultural criminology and narrative criminology are imbricated, taking notice of commonalities in cultural criminology’s analysis of media looping and narrative criminology’s identification of cycles of storytelling practice and lived experiences. A consideration of Donald Trump’s attempts to control narrative is used to develop an argument regarding cultural criminology’s and narrative criminology’s joint questioning of linear sequencing and mutual recognition of circulating fluidity

This article investigates whether cyber delinquent behaviour of school friends, other offline friends and online contacts is related to cyber delinquent behaviour of individuals, and whether this relation differs for cyber dependent, cyber enabled and traditional crime. We used both direct and indirect measures of cyber delinquency of friends. We employed data from the first wave of a large-scale study on the causes of online delinquency among Dutch juveniles (n=889; mean age=16.8 years). The results suggest that both direct and indirect measures of levels of friend delinquency were related to levels of individual cyber offending. However, indirect measures had a stronger association with individual online delinquency than direct measures. This suggests that respondents make incorrect estimates of their friends’ levels of online delinquency. Moreover, no differences were found in the strength of the relation between individual online offending and indirect measures of online offending of school friends, offline friends and online friends. This suggests that friends of different types all play an important role in individual online offending.

Given that the social life of youngsters develops more and more online, attention for cybercrime has grown as well. However, no Flemish data is available yet. This study uses data from two representative samples of the Flemish youth to research the prevalence and risk profiles of on- and offline crime. Compared to offline crime, online crime is relatively limited. In addition, results showed that online offenders had the least severe risk profile, while offenders of both on- and offline delinquency had the most severe profile. For victimization, it appeared that it is important to consider individual types of offences, since complex differences were found between various crime types. These results indicate a limited, but not ignorable, occurrence of online crime, and a difference in risk profiles for offline and online crime.

In this paper we describe the first results of a recent cohort study conducted at Ghent University and focus on the applied study design. Existing cross-sectional studies regarding sexual victimization are not able to make causal statements about its risk and outcome factors. This cohort study aims to answer these questions. Results of this study confirmed that students are often confronted with sexual assault and seldom consult existing support services. This paper emphasizes the advantages of a longitudinal design within victimological research including the possibilities and difficulties that accompany it.

Organizing restorative justice practices around crimes involving extremist violence remains a difficult task. It is not self-evident to bring perpetrators with very specific and radical ideas into contact with their victims. Nevertheless, interesting initiatives have been made in a number of European countries. In Spain, Italy and Northern Ireland, among others, initiatives were taken in response to the extremist violence that these countries experienced at the end of the 20th century. These initiatives have a very specific context and praxis, initiated ad hoc with attention to the specific needs of those involved. In no case can they be considered standard models or generalized practices. This contribution describes some of these initiatives in Spain, Italy and Northern Ireland and reflects on the potential uses of these dialogues in general.

This study describes how penal protection orders contribute to victim perceptions of safety, drawing upon data collected via a victim survey (n=101). Perceived victim safety is explored based on the factors of personal vulnerability, procedural justice, and experiences with compliance and enforcement. Results show that more than half of the victims in this study does not feel safer because of the protection order. The effects of the orders are even weaker for feelings of relaxation and feelings of anger about the situation. An increase in perceptions of control over the situation appears to be the most important predictor of an increase in feelings of safety and a decrease in feelings of anger, but is unrelated to an increase in feelings of relaxation. The effect of procedural justice differs per outcome measure. It is associated positively with increased feelings of safety, but negatively with decreased feelings of anger because of the protection order. The positive association with feelings of safety is partly indirect via personal vulnerability. Findings result in various suggestions for future research.

Using frame analyses, the authors explore how people confirm, question or deny victimization, or refrain from interpretation. A frame consists of a problem definition (acts), the diagnosis of causes (identifying actors), and moral judgments. Results confirm that the interaction between factors defines the interpretation of victimization. Similar acts (for instance the consumption of alcohol) are ascribed different meanings depending on the type of frame. The positioning of actors in a frame determines who or what is perceived responsible for the (moral) judgment.

For co-victims of severe traffic offenses in the Netherlands, peer support is offered. However, no research into the meaning of peer support for this specific group of victims has been conducted. In this study, nineteen narrative interviews with co-victims of traffic offenses were collected. These interviews show that through dialogue and the sharing of experiences, as well as the care and support for each other, peer support offers the possibility to work on the meaning-making of the traffic offense and its aftermath. The article ends with policy implications and steps for follow-up research.

This study describes the trend in victimization of homicide in the Netherlands in the period 1992-2016. Using data from the Dutch Homicide Monitor, the findings show that the homicide rate has been falling since the 1990s. This decrease is the greatest among male and female victims between the ages 20 and 39. This findings emphasize the importance of shifting the discussion about the general homicide drop to an in-depth analysis of gender and age of victims of homicide.