Honour, violence and masculinity are closely linked in traditional criminology, and are combined with an ethnic profile of the offender. This article discusses the conclusion of these assumptions as ethnocentric, but also as a simplification of the gendered idea of honour. Beliefs about honour, which are reduced to the male gender, and understood as conductive to crime, disregard insights regarding violent females, and awareness about the significance of honour in marginalized groups. Furthermore, this contribution discusses the supplementary value of a critical gender perspective, for discussion in criminology about honour and crime.

Images can honour and dishonour people. But they only do so when that specific meaning is assigned to the image. This article shows that the meaning of images is dynamic and subjective in nature, using three analytical dimensions: content, format and context. These three dimensions are explored in two series of images: painted portraits of deceased American soldiers and photographs of posters of Palestinian suicide bombers. Whether these images are honouring or dishonouring the people portrayed depends on the viewer who constructs their meaning. This not only gives the creator and distributor a (moral) responsibility, but the viewer as well.

Honour-based violence (HBV) is a tight knot of conflict, gender and ethnicity. It is also the sensational subject of many bestselling books, in which mostly female victims of HBV tell their life stories. Researchers of feminism and multiculturalism argue that migrant women are often presented as passive victims, and migrant men as violent perpetrators. In our first article for PROCES on this subject, we analysed ten (auto)biographies of female victims of HBV, using theoretical insights on stigmatization. After the publication of this article, we continued to collect these true life stories. In our current article, we analyse two new aspects: how do these stories find their way to the Internet, and are there any HBV stories by male authors? Do stories by male authors shed a different light on honour conflicts and on stereotypes of culture and gender?

In the Netherlands honour based violence is often associated with cases that take place in a Turkish context. But honour codes can be found all over the world. In order to develop a more profound understanding of honour based violence it is therefore important to study this phenomenon in different social and cultural circumstances. In this contribution attention is paid towards the experiences of young men from Curaçao that live on the fringes of Dutch society. How do they perceive honour and the relationship with the use of violence?

Honour-related emotions such as shame, guilt, anger, distrust and pride play a critical role in regulating the response to a traumatic event and the severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms. Crimes with the intent to cause harm to a person include, to a greater or lesser extent, a component to overpower and humiliate. Such traumatic experiences can, especially in more collectivist cultures, lead to a complex mix of posttraumatic guilt and shame. In order to restore honour, posttraumatic shame or guilt can lead to violence. Together with posttraumatic stress symptoms such as flashbacks and hyperarousal it may even lead to excessive violence.

‘Pride’ and ‘honour’ are two concepts that are closely related and in the context of South Africa, are often based on a history of violent battles between various groups in society. VU University Amsterdam has lifelong relations with the historically Afrikaner universities in South Africa. During the Apartheid years the Afrikaner universities scientifically legitimized many of the apartheid policies and practices. In that sense VU University Amsterdam, through its relations to South African counterparts, may be considered complicit with the policies and practices of the Apartheid regime. Consequently, there seems little reason for pride and honour, but rather shame about having sided with academic partners who have at least passively supported the regime? Starting with an explicit acknowledgement of this complicity, the oeuvre of former Archbishop Desmond Tutu may open a path of hope for VUA to contribute to mending past injustices and by, together with its South African academic partners, working towards equality and building new relations in the present South African society.

For several years the Netherlands has been facing group violence around football matches and other recreational events. Offenders involved may be characterized as notorious troublemakers, incidental offenders or ‘new hooligans’. Notorious troublemakers and new hooligans actively look for risky situations. Their behavior is related to both contextual factors and individual predispositions. In contrast incidental offenders get involved in public disorder only due to a combination of circumstances. (Individual) disruptive behavior during public disorder therefore has different underlying causes. A combination of a person-centered approach, early identification of potential notorious troublemakers and situational prevention measures are important pillars for future policy and police practice.

When a person commits a severe crime in the Netherlands, for which he cannot be (fully) held responsible because of a mental disorder, a judge may impose a hospital order in a secured psychiatric institution. To make this possible, behavioural experts have to assess whether the suspect suffered from a mental disorder at the time of the crime. However, during this assessment a suspect has the right to remain silent. Since recent years the number of non-cooperating suspects is increasing. To solve this problem, the Secretary of State of Security and Justice has submitted a legislative proposal, which makes it possible to force health professionals to submit past medical records of the suspect to the behavioural experts for their assessment without his consent. This breaches the professional law of confidentiality. Following case law of the European Court of Human Rights, this can only be justified, if it complies with the principles of proportionality, subsidiarity and necessity. The legislative proposal does not comply with these principles, as alternatives are available. These are: improvement of the forensic psychiatric care, reduction of the duration of the treatment and extension of the behavioral research period.

Irregular immigration is considered a big problem to Western societies. In the Dutch political discourse much attention is being attributed to dealing with a specific group of irregular immigrants: those who commit crimes and cause nuisance. Despite firm migration policies focusing on catching and deporting criminal undocumented immigrant, many seem to be coming back. By means of a exploratory study this article empirically explores the underlying rationales and traits of illegal immigrants returning to the Netherlands after they have been deported.

A substantial number of children are confronted with the detention of their mothers. Empirical research shows that these children’s well-being is seriously affected, although no study has been able to assess whether a mother’s detention as such causes long-term damage. On the basis of children’s interests, this article defends the principle that mothers who are actively involved in raising their children should not receive a prison sentence but an alternative punishment, unless continuing care is detrimental to the children or if the legal order or interests of society and its citizens would be disproportionally threatened. The article ends with several practical implications.

The SVG aims to improve its ability to show the social relevance of the work done by organizations for the rehabilitation and probation of drug-addicted offenders. As a first step the SVG asked the Verwey-Jonker Institute to develop a monitor which provides structurally insight into the returns of this work. The monitor couples data at the individual client level to relevant indicators. The monitor’s results are very promising. A year after they had come into contact with the rehabilitating institutions, clients committed significantly fewer criminal offences than they did during the year prior to that moment. Contacts with the police decreased as well.

According to the text of the law and the meaning of the (international and) Dutch legislator, someone can also commit the crime of money laundering when the illegal proceeds originate from a crime he committed himself. The acquisition or possession of property that was derived from criminal activity is also considered as money laundering regardless whose criminal activity it was. The Dutch Supreme Court made an exception for situations in which the defendant has done nothing to conceal or disguise the criminal background of the property. This means that, for instance, when a drug dealer has hidden his ‘dirty money’ in or around his house, it cannot be qualified as money laundering. This poses problems for investigative authorities. In this article, the possibility of regarding the act of hiding and keeping hidden money as an attempt to launder money, based on the presumption that every act involving the hidden or kept money will result in money laundering, is researched.

This paper studies the development of the average punishment per criminal offence, the product of frequency and severity, imposed by the Criminal Justice System in the Netherlands over the period 1995-2012. Available data cover all principal sanctions: (unconditional) prison sentences, community service orders and fines. A decomposition is made to separate the frequency and severity of punishment from size effects (changes in the composition of crime). The decomposition points out that, on average, crime has become more serious over time. The average punishment per criminal offence in 2012 is lower than it was in 1995.