Dutch youth care was decentralized in 2015. Since the transfer to the municipalities, youth care is in a state of deep crisis. There are long waiting lists, even in situations of acute need; there is lack of money, of professional and experienced staff, of adequate care, and of central coordination and guidance. In contrast to Denmark, where youth care was transferred to municipalities in 2007, there was barely time to prepare the transfer in the Netherlands. Moreover, the number of municipalities was not significantly reduced and the funding was extremely cut back. In this article, a number of interventions is being proposed to save what can still be saved. First, funding will have to be substantially increased. Second, the access to youth mental health care should not be a matter of municipal authority.

Compared to victims, relatively little is known about the role of offenders’ emotions, needs and intentions in their (voluntary) decision to participate in victim-offender mediation (VOM). Insight into this decision process among offenders is important, as it may explain (part of) the positive outcomes participation in VOM can have for them, as well as for victims. Based on the work of Shnabel and Nadler (2008; 2015), we predicted that the need to restore their moral image is an important, underlying explanation for why offenders participate in VOM. To test this, we sampled 91 victim-offender mediation cases from the Dutch mediation agency Perpectief Herstelbemiddeling based on pre-defined characteristics. We approached the mediators who handled these cases and asked them to indicate the emotions, need to restore the moral image and intentions of the offenders in these cases. Consequently, we examined how these variables predicted offenders’ actual willingness to participate (or not) in these cases. Results indicated that the need to restore the moral image is indeed an important underlying factor in offenders’ decision to participate in VOM: according to mediators’ answers, offenders who felt more remorse about their crime, felt a stronger need to restore their moral image, which in turn predicted a stronger intention to apologize and help the victim. This intention to apologize and help emerged as the strongest, direct predictor of offenders’ willingness to participate. The relevance of Shnabel and Nadler’s needs-based model of reconciliation for VOM is discussed as well as important future research questions that remain.

In the past five years, the Council of State, the National Ombudsman and several academics have criticized the way in which new legislation has been made. In their view, principles of law and the rule of law are insufficiently uphold due to an instrumentalist view on law. This criticism urged the authors to conduct an empirical study into the question how legislative drafters deal with legislative plans which are problematic from a legal or rule of law point of view, and how they justify their role in the legislative process. This study is explorative and qualitative in nature. During the summer of 2018, 24 legislative lawyers from five different Dutch ministries have been interviewed. The results show that the role of legislative lawyers can best be characterized as constructively critical. As their tasks encompass much more than solely the actual drafting of legislation, they more and more resemble their colleagues from the policy department. The authors suggest that legislative lawyers should articulate their distinctive professional ethics in order to strengthen the checks and balances within the ministries.

The last years victim awareness has received special attention in the Dutch probation service. Three goals are central: respecting the rights and interests of the victim, mapping and increasing victim awareness of the probation client, and working towards the possibilities for recovery. Based on discussions with probation officers, this contribution sketches a picture of how this takes shape in practice. Experience shows that good results are achieved, but that more training and attention to the subject is needed to give it a full place in the probation work.

In deze bijdrage staat General Comment No. 20 van het VN-Kinderrechtencomité, over het implementeren van kinderrechten tijdens de adolescentie, centraal. De aanleiding voor en inhoud van de General Comment worden in hoofdlijnen besproken. Daarnaast wordt specifiek aandacht besteed aan een onderwerp dat door het Kinderrechtencomité in het bijzonder van belang wordt geacht voor de bescherming van de rechten van adolescenten: het strafrecht. In dat kader wordt ook de positie van adolescenten in het Nederlandse straf(proces)recht behandeld.

Victims who suffer severe damages due to the act of a violent crime can request state compensation from the Dutch Violent Offences Compensation Fund (VOCF). VOCF workers who decide on these requests use their discretionary powers to translate the VOCF’s rules and policy into concrete actions. This study investigated (1) to what extent these VOCF workers match Lipsky’s definition of street-level bureaucrats and (2) what routines and heuristics they use to deal with time and information constraints. On the basis of document analysis and interviews, we found that the decision makers of the VOCF can to a certain extent be seen as street-level bureaucrats. To make decisions timely, some of them use routines such as the ‘downstream orientation’. This means that they award requests for compensation if they think that the applicant would be able to successfully contest a rejecting decision. To deal with a lack of information, they sometimes include a review clause in the text of a rejection decision. The use of heuristics was not found among the lawyers who decide in first instance, but in case of appeal hearings heuristics such as the affect and representativeness heuristic seem to play a role in the decision-making process. Future research should investigate whether these routines and heuristics lead to disparities in outcomes.

This article is about the work of Wibo van Rossum who passed away in April 2018. Trained as a legal anthropologist he has conducted empirical research on the administration of justice in the Netherlands for many years. This anthology is about four research reports he produced and many articles he has written in two decades. This article provides an academic as well as a practical review of his work.

In this article Bas van Stokkom and Renée Kool discuss work and life of the Dutch comparative legal scholar Chrisje Brants. The article is based on an interview the authors conducted with Brants as well as themes that Brants developed in her published work. The article discusses in particular themes such as comparative research, the Utrecht School, and the role of criminal law.

In het conceptwetsvoorstel tot vaststelling van Boek 6 van het nieuwe Wetboek van Strafvordering wordt veel aandacht besteed aan de positie van ouders in het jeugdstrafproces. Bij het opstellen van deze bepalingen heeft de wetgever de tekst van Richtlijn (EU) 2016/800 betreffende procedurele waarborgen voor kinderen die verdachte of beklaagde zijn in een strafprocedure niet meegenomen, terwijl deze richtlijn belangrijke waarborgen bevat om te verzekeren dat jeugdige verdachten hun recht op een eerlijk proces kunnen uitoefenen. In dit artikel wordt nader ingegaan op de voorgestelde bepalingen rondom de positie van ouders in het conceptwetsvoorstel en wordt onderzocht in hoeverre deze positie in overeenstemming is met de Europese richtlijn.

The report ‘ZAM/ACB research on possibilities and impediments for commercial mediation’ of the Utrecht Montaigne Centre represents the most important results for the three target groups (lawyers, firms, and judges), with an accent on how users of commercial mediation in the Netherlands think about the potential of mediation.

Wanneer een jeugdige te maken krijgt met jeugdreclassering, richt Jeugdbescherming Regio Amsterdam, verder te noemen Jeugdbescherming, zich bij de begeleiding van de jeugdige niet alleen op de jeugdige zelf, maar op het hele gezin. Conform de door Jeugdbescherming ontwikkelde methodiek, Intensief Systeemgericht Casemanagement, wordt het hele gezin betrokken. Deze methodiek wordt toegepast ongeacht het kader (het civielrechtelijke, strafrechtelijke of preventieve kader) waarbinnen Jeugdbescherming werkt. In tegenstelling tot in het civiele recht, lijkt de focus in de wet in het geval van het strafrecht echter vooral te zijn gericht op de individuele jeugdige verdachte of veroordeelde. In dit artikel wordt daarom onderzocht welke mogelijkheden de wet biedt om te werken volgens het Intensief Systeemgericht Casemanagement in het strafrechtelijke kader, tijdens de uitvoering van jeugdreclassering. Ook worden er aanknopingspunten in de doelstellingen van jeugdreclassering gezocht voor deze werkwijze.

Binnen de jeugdhulpverlening is een kader ontstaan waarbinnen gezinnen bewogen worden om ‘vrijwillig’ mee te werken aan de hulpverlening. Dit ‘drangkader’ is niet wettelijk geregeld, met onduidelijkheden over de rechten, plichten en verantwoordelijkheden van betrokkenen tot gevolg. Dit artikel geeft de huidige stand van zaken weer.

A comparative legal research between Dutch and Belgian closed juvenile detention centres, focused on the internal legal status

This article addresses the role of parents and girlfriends in the process of giving up crime. It presents findings from a longitudinal study of 81 young recidivists examined over 15 years. It concludes that parents played a pivotal role in this process, since the young men began to realize what misery they had caused them. However, these young men did not change their path in life because of their parents. We conclude even stronger than with the parents that it does not seem likely that a young recidivist would desist because of his girlfriend. Nevertheless, it would seem that both parents and a secure, lasting relationship could indeed have a positive influence in this process, particularly in the motivation to stick to a new path towards a more pro-social lifestyle once it has been set out on.