Based on state-of-the-art scientific knowledge, this article reviews the physical aspects of firefighting in relation to physical safety. Firefighting is known to be one of the most demanding occupations. Based on the ‘Occupational Demands Model’ the (physical) strain of firefighting is described. The physical demands of firefighting are determined by a combination of firefighting-specific efforts, the use of personal protective equipment and enviromental and climatological conditions. The effects on the firefighter depend on his/her health and fitness status as well as on his/her hydration and nutrition status and influences the repressive job performance. If the demands and the effects are not in balance, personal safety, health and effectivity of the firefighter’s deployment are in jeopardy and hence his/her physical safety. In the second part of the paper, the relationship between the physical demands of firefighting and health, fitness and deployability of firefighters are described. Finally, a method of maintaining deployability prior to, during and post firefighting activities or training through active recovery is described to improve the preparedness of the individual firefighter.

This article develops a victimological perspective on international criminal justice, based on a review of the main victimological characteristics of international crimes. These include the complicity or active involvement of government agencies, the large numbers of victims and the peculiar position of international crime victims who, at the time the crimes are committed, are usually not viewed as victims by the perpetrators, but placed outside the moral sphere or even depicted as perpetrators rather than victims.Key elements of this perspective concern the external coherence of the criminal justice reaction - the interlinking of criminal justice with other reparative efforts - as well as its internal coherence - the extent to which the procedures of international criminal justice are aligned with what it realistically can and should achieve. With internal coherence in mind, the article examines the victimological findings relating to the main rights of victims in the criminal procedure (recognition/acknowledgement, information/participation and compensation/reparation) and subsequently analyzes how the specifics of international crimes moderate them.

The intensification of scientific competition and the availability of scientific knowledge on the internet seem to be rendering the notion of intellectual property obsolete. Conventional citation- and referencing practices through which intellectual debt is acknowledged are increasingly being ignored or undermined. In this essay, it is argued that these conventional citation- and referencing practices represent valuable norms of scientific conduct and, therefore, are vital to the scientific ethos of free and independent scientific research. For this reason, editors and reviewers need to accept their responsibility for educating the next generation of scholars to respect conventions for acknowledging intellectual debt.

The primary goal of this article is to survey the various criminological study programmes in the Netherlands and Flanders and of the jobs students attain after graduating in criminology. The theoretical question posed is to what extent the enormous expansion of criminology over the last decade has contributed to the scientific development of criminology as a discipline and to better-informed crime policies. Though the answer to this question remains limited to an ‘it depends on how you look at it’ position, the author is not pessimistic. Taking into account the current grim penal climate and the fact that the criminologist is a relative newcomer on the Dutch labour market, the positions criminology students have been able to gain – with jobs within the police force, in research and policy-development as prime fields – give reason to be hopeful, if reflexivity and overview remain the primary educational goals and practical skills training is not seen as the ‘trick box’ for the ‘quick fix’ of the safety problem.