White-collar crime is mostly committed by men. It remains to be seen if this will stay this way. Increasing numbers of women succeed in attaining management positions in organizations. Could we therefore expect an increase in female white-collar crime?Criminological theories on female crime and on white-collar crime lead to contradicting hypotheses.Research on white-collar and organizational crime predominantly produces a situational hypothesis explanation according to which we could expect that the rise of women in organizational hierarchies will also bring more female white-collar crime.Research on female delinquency might lead to an opposite gender-difference hypothesis that would predict less white-collar crime, because they have a lesser tendency to show risky behavior.In this article, both assumptions will be elaborated for further research, against the background of possible gender bias in the relation between women and white-collar crime.

The backgrounds of the female vagabonds and beggars at the end of the 19th century show that contrary to their male counterparts, these females originated almost exclusively from the lower echelons of society. Their professions and those of their parents and husbands were low and ill-paid. Disease was prevalent, mortality was high and many of them had physical or psychological problems. Most of them were single and 25 percent had children out of wedlock. 20 Percent was convicted for mostly minor crimes. Because of their behaviour it is likely that they were not accepted by their family and received no support from the church or other institutions for relief of the poor. To beg and get convicted to RWI-placement may have been their only remaining survival strategy once they were old and ill.

This special issue focuses on the role of sex/gender in Dutch and Belgian criminological and penological research and theory. This introductory article draws the history of thought and research within Dutch-language criminology and explores international developments, in particular the influence of feminist critique on theory and research.This framework serves the positioning of the other contributions, on the one hand research exploring the differences in crime between men and women and on the other hand empirical and theoretical articles focusing on (the social construction of) gender. Finally some innovative methodological findings will be discussed, also with regard to future criminological research.

Over 700 students judged fictitious descriptions of court cases, in which the gender of the offender was systematically varied, as well as a number of aspects pertinent to theories that explain disparities in sentencing between females and males. The results show that females indeed received shorter sentences than males, and that this difference could be attributed to the fact that male student-judges gave women shorter sentences and differential sentencing for violent crimes. We found mixed support for the chivalry as well as for the perceptual shorthand theory. More research is needed, in more realistic settings, to explain gender differences in sentencing.

Rape drugs (or drink spiking) discourse reflects gender stereotypes in a much more differentiated way than previous studies suppose. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of news items and online discussions proved stereotypes of ideal female victims and male perpetrators to be most prominent in news media. Postings to online bulletin boards were more skeptical about the alleged victims’ innocence and truthfulness. Studies in this area that focus on news media and institutional discourse overestimate the predominance of the ideal victim stereotype. In order to correct this bias, the authors urge criminologists to be more attentive to the relevance and power of informal crime stories and discussions, particularly those appearing in social media.

In this article, an ongoing Flemish qualitative research on life histories and criminal careers of women in prison is discussed. We conducted autobiographical interviews with 40 female prisoners aged between 20 and 69 years. Considering our target group, we didn’t always succeed in conducting an autobiographical interview. In practice we often conducted a classic open in-depth interview. By means of file analysis, we reconstituted the criminal career of every interviewed woman. Thanks to the retrospective approach we could reveal a diversity of trajectories. We identified three pathways: (1) youth offenders, (2) early adult-onset offenders and (3) late adult-onset offenders. Remarkably, quite a lot of women are late starters. Three risk factors – to a greater or lesser extent – play a role in these pathways: a problematic educational situation in childhood, drugs and negative love affairs.

Gender, in criminological research, often refers to women. Although ‘masculinities’ and crime have been intertwined internationally for more than two decades, this isn’t so for Dutch research. Based on this international critique, this article introduces the masculinities approach in Dutch penology. Prisons are generally considered as hypermasculine settings (Toch, 1998), but this hypothesis is seldom explored within a gender framework. Nevertheless, ‘doing masculinity’ is an important coping strategy for male prisoners (Jewkes, 2005). This gap is tackled on two levels: (1) the conceptualization of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and (2) a critical, masculinity-oriented analysis of the existing knowledge on prison life, prison culture and prison hierarchy. It aims to tackle prison masculinity stereotypes, since traditional penal insights aren’t necessarily valid from a gender point of view (Evans & Wallace, 2008). Therefore, we conclude by analyzing the value of masculinity studies for penology.

Two explanations can be found for the unequal geographical concentrations of avoidance behaviour: (1) the demographic composition of residential areas, and (2) the social and structural contextual effects of residential areas. Different studies all over the world have shown that women report more fear of crime than men. In this article we study contextual as well as individual determinants of avoidance behaviour for men and women separately to gain a better insight in the explanation of individual differences in avoidance behaviour. The theoretical framework of this study is derived from the collective efficacy theory. In the present study a contextual model was tested on a 2009 survey of 2,080 residents from 40 municipalities in Flanders (Belgium), by using block-wise multilevel analyses on data from the Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders Survey (SCIF-survey), the Security Monitor and the registered crime statistics. The results indicate that economic disadvantage in the residential area increases the risk on avoidance behaviour both for men and women, because these areas often have high disorder and violent crime rates. With regard to the social ecology of crime this study shows that more research is needed on the differences in contextual effects of structural area characteristics on avoidance behaviour.

Juvenile crime has been present form the Midle Ages onward, although it was nly described as a separate phenomenon in the Nineteenth Century. This article explores the similarities and notions of juvenile crime from a long-term perspective. This sheds another light on present-day youth problems and delinquency and ways to prevent and/or punish them.

Since the last years there is extensive ongoing debate in Belgium about jury trials at the Assize Court. These trials are an example of direct participation of citizens in the criminal justice system. Hence this jury has obtained a special position in the Belgian administration of justice. Jury deliberations behind closed doors and the isolation of jury members from the outside world contribute to the fascination for this legal phenomenon. The element of secrecy also explains why there is so little empirical research on the jury’s functioning and the jurors’ experiences during the process. By means of interviews with former jury members, we studied the influence of lay participation in a jury trial on their views and confidence in jury decision making. We found that a positive evaluation of participation in a jury may strengthen their involvement with and trust in jury decision making. However, our research also reveals that jury trials may lead to some unacceptable deficits in the proceedings and outcome of the process. These results are contextualised in the broader debate about the jury and the demand for reform of the assize court proceedings.

In the Netherlands, the number of cocaine traffickers arrested at Schiphol International Airport peaked in 2003. In May 2003, sentencing guidelines regarding cocaine traffickers were redefined into a smaller number of categories (wider quantity ranges, less specified offender categories) with lower sentences than before. New guidelines allowed criminal courts more flexibility, and judges were expected to sentence cocaine traffickers more often than before in accordance with guidelines. All cases, at all four applicable criminal courts, against cocaine traffickers that had been arrested at Schiphol in 2003 were analyzed (877 simple court and 994 full court cases). In between 30 and 40 percent of cases sentences were not according to the guidelines (mostly lower), and even more frequently than before the new guidelines had been introduced. Experience as a judge (number of years) was not associated with keeping up with guidelines, but male judges sentenced suspects more often than female judges in discordance with guidelines (and consequently below guidelines). In line with American literature, personal characteristics of suspects appeared strong predictors of the extent judges conformed to sentencing guidelines. Female offenders were twice as often as male offenders sentenced lower than the guidelines. The same result was found for offenders born or living in the Netherlands, versus migrants and offenders living abroad.

Marriage is considered to be an important life-course event that can lead to desistance from a criminal career. However, desistance is far less obvious when offenders marry criminal partners. The aim of this study is to investigate what impact a spouse’s criminal career at the time of marriage has on persistence in crime. To analyze the relationship between marriage, spousal criminality, and criminal offending, we use a unique longitudinal dataset: the Criminal Career and Life-course Study. This is the first study that contains longitudinal data on the criminal careers of both offenders and their partners. Results show that the frequency of criminal conviction is lower if men marry non-criminal spouses. However, if men marry criminal spouses, their conviction rate does not differ from those who remain single. For women, on the other hand, marriage is related to lower conviction frequencies no matter the spouse’s criminal history.

This research aimed to describe the remigration of Bulgarian women who had been exploited in prostitution in the Netherlands. The difficulties they encountered during their attempt to reintegrate in their environment of origin was one of the main points of interest. Files of Bulgarian women registered as victims have been analyzed in both the Netherlands and in Bulgaria. Interviews were held with current Bulgarian sex workers, former victims of trafficking and several professionals involved in the wellbeing of these women. In many cases remigration turned out to be a temporary situation as many women returned to the Netherlands later on. Partly for that reason it appeared difficult to keep track of their situation after they (initially) came back to Bulgaria. Many women encounter the very problems that contributed to the situation of trafficking in the first place. This makes it difficult to change their marginal position: prostitution remains a well paid option if the circumstances that have led to their exploitation in prostitution remain the same. This does not necessarily lead to repeated victimization, but at least to only a limited difference that reintegration programs can make.