Since mid-January 2015, nearly 300 soldiers were mobilized by the Belgian government to ensure the safety of public places in Liège, Brussels, Antwerp and Verviers, providing assistance to local and federal police forces. This provoked intense political and public debate about the issue of the provision of security in a democratic society, raising questions such as: which are the goals of security policies and what kind of risks are they supposed to address? Which control instances should be responsible for the provision of security and how should they operate? The central issue, here, is whether either civilian or military actors and practices are the most appropriate for surveillance and policing tasks. As a matter of fact, this discussion goes back to the Belgian independence and has marked the entire history of the Belgian police system, since at the heart of it, there has long been a military police force, the gendarmerie. In this contribution, we examine how the militarization of security and policing tasks evolved across the twentieth century in Belgium, which socio-political conditions shaped these evolutions, and what kind of arguments pro or contra military approaches have been advanced in this process.

Within the field of criminology, marriage and labour are important determinants for the decline in criminal behavior. However, these factors are seldom researched in the context of historical criminology. By conducting research into crimes against property in Rotterdam, those brought to the Rotterdam correctional court in the 1812-1820 period, this paper attempts to shed light on the topic. Our findings show that a majority of the delinquents in question were employed, while a minority of those female delinquents were married, yet also in gainful employment in most cases. Male adolescents, who had just entered the labour market, were the largest group of male delinquents. The female population of delinquents consisted mostly of women who were close to marriageable age. Thus, it is suggested that labour and marriage supplied insufficient economical stability to inhibit criminal behavior during the 1812-1820 period.

The files of the women in the State Labor Institution who submitted a request for reprieve showed that they were well aware of the prevailing discourses. They referred for example to their indispensability at home as mother and spouse. In case they were in the Institution for the first time and had no ‘unfavorable’ reputation they mainly succeeded. The main consideration to grant a pardon was the prospect of maintenance to prevent recurrence and consequently nuisance for society. Those who were seriously ill were pardoned because they could not work, the youngest residents to save them from the bad influence of their older inmates. Nevertheless many returned in the State Labor Institution.

This paper looks at how Dutch newspapers dealt with mental disorders and gender in their crime reports in 1930. The Psychopath Acts, which allowed special restriction orders (‘TBR’) to be imposed on mentally disturbed delinquents who were a danger to society, had just come into effect then. The newspapers did not present such TBR criminals as dangerous or mentally disturbed. Instead, the papers used ‘madness’ to explain apparently motiveless crimes such as killing one’s own children. Female perpetrators were no more likely to be labelled mentally ill than male perpetrators.

Throughout history people have committed theft, fraud and murder. However, the frequency and severity of crimes are not static, but varies across time and space. The ways in which people respond to crime also change over time: penalties such as banishment, corporal punishment and capital punishment were frequently imposed in early modern Europe, but do not exist here anymore. Our thinking about crime and crime control changed over time as well. In addition to so-called hard crimes such as theft and homicide, various kinds of conduct were – in some times and periods – labeled as criminal (adultery, fornication and blasphemy). In crime control, state formation resulted in the emergence and expansion and professionalization of police forces and judicial systems, which development was accompanied by increasing interactions and interplays between supranational governments, private crime fighters, and informal forms of social control. Criminologists study fluid phenomena which vary across time and space. This makes exchange of knowledge and research cooperation between historians and criminologists particularly fruitful, or as Paul Knepper put it: ‘From what has been done so far, one thing is clear enough: the most interesting criminology arises at the point that history and criminology meet’ (Knepper, 2013, 2081).

This contribution focuses on the manner in which between 1880 and 1940 private actors in the port of Antwerp, whether or not in cooperation with the public authorities, interpreted crime and crime control in terms of risk management, loss prevention and situational crime prevention through a strict economic approach, as opposed to the then dominant institutionalized and criminological discourse. Whereas crime control by the major criminal justice institutions put an emphasis on the biological, psychological and sociological characteristics of the offender, measures taken by maritime, industrial and commercial organizations were aimed exclusively at manipulating the temporal and spatial dimensions of the opportunity structures in which criminal activities, which posed a threat to the economic profitability, could develop.

While most restorative justice research would suggest that victims and offenders are often satisfied with their experiences, the number of referrals to these type of programs remain low. This lack of accessibility was the topic of the European Forum for Restorative Justice project, ‘Accessibility and Initiation of Restorative Justice’. This article reports on the project’s findings with regard to several factors which limit greater accessibility, as supported by the attitudes of referral bodies and restorative justice practitioners examined in the frame of this project. The results of previous research and the current empirical research illustrate how accessibility is hindered by (1) lacking or insufficient restorative justice legislation, (2) exclusion criteria regarding which cases may be suitable to restorative justice procedures, (3) a lack of knowledge among legal actors, restorative justice practitioners and the general public about restorative justice and its benefits, (4) the persistence of a retributive legal culture within criminal justice and (5) a need for greater cooperation among those who are involved whether as referral bodies or mediators or facilitators. Qualitative data is presented to provide a better understanding of these elements, in addition to potential solutions that were reported by the respondents. Furthermore, the authors take a closer look at the current situation in the Netherlands, including an overview of the trainings that were developed within the Accessibility project. The results of these trainings reinforce the factors that were identified by previous research and the current empirical research, and aimed to look for solutions to the main barriers to greater accessibility.

In this article we describe the mediation practice that exists at the prosecution office in Maastricht/Limburg and which was established in 1999. First, we summarize the main results of our earlier study on the relation between mediation and recidivism/reoffending rates on the basis of the Maastricht mediation model. In the remaining part of this article, we focus on answering the question whether the main results of our earlier study differ when we distinguish between adult (23 years and older) and juvenile (under 23 years) offenders. In order to answer this question several extra analyses have been carried out. The main conclusion of this article is that offenders with whom is mediated, reoffend significantly less than offenders who got a regular criminal sanction – regardless of whether the offenders are older or younger than 23 years.

This article studies the position of young victims in restorative justice and mediation. First we study the literature, which shows that although young victims may have specific needs, their position within restorative justice remains underexposed. Therefore, we have set up a small explorative study in the beginning of 2015. Through nine interviews with young victims who have gone through a mediation process in Flanders, we sought to answer three central questions. The article discusses whether these victims were satisfied with the mediation process, whether they could have a say in the process and what the importance was of having support persons throughout the mediation process.
We found that the participation of the parents does influence the mediation process, since the parents are the main support persons for the young victim. Other support people are seldom present in the process, although some victims wanted the school or a friend to participate. Most of the young victims found they had a say in the process, but the presence of the parents could be an impediment in that regard. Young victims interviewed were generally satisfied with the mediator and mediation process, but not always with the outcome of the mediation. Ensuring that these young victims really get a say in the process proved to be a point of attention for practice.

Community oriented policing (COP) can be seen as a co-production between citizens and police (and other stakeholders) in increasing public safety. There is a broad range of projects to cooperate with citizens. We ordered these projects along two dimensions: level of co-production (informing/consulting, advising and co-creation) and domain (prevention, law and order, investigation and quality of life). Today, most initiatives are at the lowest rungs (informing and consulting), but social media provide new possibilities to involve citizens in a more direct and fast way. The effects of the various projects are mostly limited to psycho-social factors like experienced safety, feelings of control and legitimacy. However recent studies show that these factors may have an indirect effect on crime rate. Furthermore, as reducing crime rate was not the only goal for introducing COP effect studies should not be limited to crime rate but incorporate a broad range of indicators.