There is no clear answer to the question if corruption makes victims. Currently an (international) discussion is taking place about this matter. On the one hand it can be discussed that corruption in general does not know any direct victims and that corruption can even take place without any damage. On the other hand it is known that corruption can cause tremendous public and financial damage, with society as a whole as the victim of this crime, whether or not in primary gradation. In the underlying article these two perspectives will be discussed and applied on two cases. Special attention will also be paid to the impact and relevance of pointing out the victims.

Criminology traditionally focuses on the human experience. However, several criminologists have seriously criticized this anthropocentric perspective. In their view from a criminological perspective humans and other than human animals should be given equal attention. Although they advocate a non-speciesist criminology, they are not trying to fundamentally change criminology as we know it. Instead, their appeal is to not consider other than human creatures as passive objects and solely from the perspective of their usefulness for humans. Yet, this objective poses substantial methodological challenges to criminologists.

Last year the article ‘Episodic memory and interviewing witnesses. What do police interviewers know about this topic?’ (Odinot, Boon & Wolters, 2015, TvC, 57(3), 279-299) was published in this journal. The article describes a study that explored the knowledge of police interviewers about episodic memory. The researchers concluded that police interviewers had insufficient knowledge of episodic memory and that this was related to the lack of psychological terms in the manual of the curriculum of police training. In this article we describe the lack of scientific consensus about episodic memory and the consequences of this for doing research with lists with theses about this subject. Differences between interviewing witnesses and suspects will be discussed. We also question whether it is necessary that police interviewers have thorough knowledge of episodic memory. More important is what knowledge does police need when doing interviews and how are these conducted? Some factors have a negative impact on the quality of those interviews, so we end up with some recommendations for improving the quality of interviews in police practice.