Older people are less frequent a victim of violence, crime against property, vandalism as well as cybercrime. This probably can partly be explained by the fact that elder people find themselves relatively less often in situations (think of public space, cyberspace) where the stakes of being victimized are high. Almost half of the older victims of violence know their offenders. Mostly they are from the same neighborhood. The majority of the violent offences against older people thereby occur in their everyday surroundings. Even though older people experience criminal offences less often, their attitude, the way they look at crime and adapt their behavior accordingly does – in most cases – not differ from the average Dutchman. Their fear of being victimized is equal to other age groups as is their assessment of the risk of being victimized and their behavior in avoiding unsafe places in their neighborhood.

In this article the authors discuss the opportunities and challenges they experience from the criminal investigation of financial exploitation of the elderly. By sharing knowledge and experience, they stress that the all party approach in this distressing problem, from the viewpoint of criminal investigations, will achieve the best results. This article could thus be seen as a first step, and invitation, to discuss future interventions and policymaking on fighting the exploitation of the elderly to prevent, detect and investigate these crimes.

A legal document appointing one or more people to help a person make decisions or to make decisions on the person’s behalf is a power of attorney (levenstestament). It is meant to be used in situations when illness prevents a person to make decisions that need to be made. In the levenstestament certain trusted people have been given the authority to manage money affairs, property and medical decisions on behalf of the ill person. The document is registered. The author argues that mental incapacity can also be temporarily or partially.

In recent years the total number of violent robberies in the Netherlands has gone down sharply, but the number of robberies on private homes doesn’t decline. Especially robberies on private homes of the elderly are notorious for the level of violence used by the attackers, while the loot is often negligible. In this article the authors investigate this offense. Chances of becoming a victim are very small, but people who are robbed in their own homes often face severe violence. On the one hand these high violence levels and consequential injuries are related to the age of the victims: the elderly resist the attackers more than younger people do, and because of their age they are more vulnerable to physical attacks. On the other hand the high levels of violence are typical of (all) robberies on private homes: the unknown space and the unpredictable behavior of residents contribute to this. Most of these robberies are poorly planned and executed. This also explains why so many of these incidents turn nasty. The elderly are not specially targeted, the reasons they are robbed do not differ from other robberies on private homes: the attackers expect an easy accessible and substantial loot. In many cases both assumptions turn out to be wrong. Risk factors and prevention options are discussed.

Older people can become victims of abuse by someone they know and whom they depend on, such as family, friends or professional caregivers. Elder abuse is not always intentional, sometimes it is due to care falling short. Conducting a study to explore the prevalence of elder abuse is difficult. Commissioned by the Dutch State Secretary for Health, Welfare and Sport, the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) has brought together the current knowledge on this topic using the most recent data drawn from qualitative research, surveys of older persons, professionals and volunteers, and record data. The sources together do not produce an unambiguous picture of the actual number of victims in the Netherlands. All sources produce far lower figures than the estimated 200,000 based on a study of twenty years ago. The numbers found depend strongly on the research method and definition of the phenomenon.

Two approaches have dominated the way elder abuse is explained and defined: the intrapersonal and interpersonal approaches. More recently, an environmental approach is emerging that takes into account contextual factors. This approach also meets the perspectives of older individuals themselves better. They describe how they feel abused or neglected by the system – by the way in which we organize our institutions. Institutions mirror our society and are shaped in interaction with societal norms and expectations. This influences the way in which older individuals are looked upon, are being approached, and how they see themselves within these institutions. This system abuse is currently beyond the scope of the most commonly used definitions and approaches of elder abuse. However, it is important to acknowledge system abuse, because it makes explicit how older individuals feel abused by and within our institutions. The distress and harm that they experience can therewith be acknowledged and prevented.

This article gives a compact overview of developments in national and European law regarding same-sex partners. Over the last decades, new legal family formats (such as registered partnership and de facto union) have been made available in a growing number of countries. The number of countries that have opened up marriage to same-sex couples is also growing. Authors of comparative family law have proposed various classifications of the new legal family formats. Meanwhile, an increasing number of EU laws now acknowledge non-marital partners. The European Courts have been asked several times to rule on controversial differentiations between different legal family formats or between same-sex and different-sex partners. In the case law of the European Court of Human Rights one can find examples of affirmative eloquence which suggest that more steps towards full legal recognition of same-sex families could be expected.

This articles offers an overview of four centuries of ‘forbidden relations’ in The Netherlands. From the late sixteenth century onwards, the dominant Calvinist church tried to ‘purify’ the Dutch nation by persecuting all forms of fornication, adultery, incest, and sodomy. The French period (1795-1813) separated church and state, and removed several forms of forbidden relations from the penal code. But social control on relations remained intense. An ‘ideal’ marriage was based on equality of the spouses in terms of social background, religion and age. Parents as well as the local community made sure young people made the ‘right’ choice. Competition between religious groups intensified in the late nineteenth century and mixed marriages became even more problematic. In the 1960s and 1970s all this began to change, and many rules and norms regarding partner choice were relaxed. An example of the changes over time are unmarried cohabitations which transformed from a crime (sanctioned by banishment) to deviant behaviour (sanctions through withholding poor relief) to a more or less normative ‘trial marriage’.

In this article we show what relationships may exist between sex workers and their partners. These relationships are diverse and sometimes complex by the presence of both intimacy and intimidation or violence. From the women’s perspective these relationships are not primarily defined as ‘violent’ and ‘involuntary’, they also provide them love, protection and security. From a governments perspective with a focus on human trafficking and exploitation of sex workers, these relationships are quickly mistrusted. In the latest measures to prevent exploitation, all sex workers are questioned about their relationships. Although this may be important for the identification of potential exploitation, in practice the opposite happens: women keep silent about their relationships towards government officials. In other words, an increasing focus on combating exploitation may enforce the stigma on relationships of sex workers.

In recent years, the number of asylum seekers in Europe has increased again. According to the figures of Eurostat, more than 600.000 applications for asylum were submitted in the countries of the EU in 2014. This is more than double compared to 2010. This article seeks to provide explanations for this sudden increase. Furthermore, this article contains a detailed description of the long route which refugees who lodge an asylum application in a Northern or Western European country have to accomplish. Many considerations have to be made during this route. Other people than the refugees themselves (i.e. traffickers) make these considerations as well and they are often restricted by the circumstances.

The arrival of asylum seekers has become a major political and social issue in Europe recently, although not for the first time in history. This article describes and analyses the reasons why growing numbers of undocumented migrants come to Europe, many of them as asylum seekers. One important reason is growing political instability in a ring of countries that surround the EU. The article also describes the different routes undocumented migrants take to the EU, the rapid changes that occur in the choice of routes, and the backgrounds of these changes. Although most attention goes to the risky transit in the Central Mediterranean area, and the number of migrants taking this route is growing, a majority of asylum seekers has reached the EU via other routes. Finally, this article also indicates roads towards finding solutions to the issue; this can only be achieved in the context of the EU.

In light of the high numbers of persons entering the EU via the southern borders and the current uneven distribution of asylum seekers (five Member States of the EU currently received in 2014 more than 70% of the total amount of refugees), there is a clear and urgent need for the EU ministers to ensure a fairer distribution of asylum seekers within the EU. The Dublin Regulation’s system of allocating the responsibility for an asylum request does not offer a solution for this challenge, also because Member States cannot have a blind faith in the standards of a number of states for processing asylum requests. There are significant differences in the application of the law and the procedures.

The advent of the Dutch National Police in 2012 is the culmination of a much longer process of centralization and scaling up of the regular police organization. Partly as a result of this process of increased scale, municipalities have introduced their own surveillance officers to patrol the streets. Thus, the contours of a dual police system have arisen. This raises various questions, and in this article we focus on two of them. First, which background factors have contributed to the emergence of new municipal enforcement organizations and to what extent developments within the police have contributed to this development? Second, what are the consequences of this dual police system and what problems and risks are involved?

Dutch policies concerning the illegal stay of aliens are characterized by regular tensions between central and local governments. This article describes various concrete (proposals for) policy changes in the last twenty years and examines the reasons for these tensions while using the distinction between policy strategies based on denial versus strategies based on adaptation (Garland). When it comes to refugee policies, the central government works in the denial mode while local governments adapt and try to find solutions in order to bring problems under control. This attitude can be explained by the local governments’ duty to provide for in the case of humanitarian emergency situations.

This article focuses on the administrative relation between the levels of authority in the Netherlands while paying special attention to the distribution of administrative tasks and legislative power between government tiers. How has this process developed since the constitutional reform in 1848? Which motives have underpinned the fluctuating ways in which responsibilities and powers were divided? The constitutional reform of 1848 laid the foundation for the current administrative structure. A three-tier system forms the basis of its organization: national government, regional government (provinces) and local governments (municipalities). This article shows that in the Netherlands the leitmotiv for decentralization is to improve the governmental performance; efficiency, standardization and simplification are recurring objectives. Decentralization is also often used as an instrument to resolve specific policy issues. The article describes a discrepancy between the motives for decentralization, which can be explained by the differences between fundamental legislation involving the administrative structure on the one hand and legislation aimed at policy-making on the other hand.

Tensions between the central national level and the local level become clearly visible in coffee shop policies, which have to fit within the international VN and EU treaties and strategies, national drug policy principles and local interests of public order. Three cases, all concerning long-term problems of drug tourism, nuisance and crime around coffee shops, illustrate these tensions. In the case of coffee shop Checkpoint near the Belgian border the Public Prosecutor aimed at solving the problem by prosecuting the coffee shop as a criminal network, while the mayor tried to minimize the negative effects by facilitating visitor flows. In the case of the private club and residence criterion in 2012 not all the mayors actually enforced these national criteria. This leads to a bigger emphasis on local tailoring. Thirdly, several mayors have opted for a regulation of cannabis production for coffee shops, while the stance of the national government is that international treaties banning this practice should be respected. The influence of local policies may be small, but in the end the local communities seem crucial when it comes to finding new ways of managing drug problems.

In this article the authors use empirical data from the Dutch Organised Crime Monitor to give empirical insight into the investments of organised crime offenders in legal economy. Using a dataset of 1,196 individual investments, they look into what kind of assets offenders purchase and where these assets are located. The authors use the empirical results to assess the tenability of different theoretical perspectives and assumptions that are present in the literature on money laundering and organised crime: the standard economic approach, the criminal infiltration approach and the social opportunity structure. The results of this study show that offenders predominantly invest in their home country and that their investments consist of tangible, familiar assets such as residences and other real estate and companies from well-known sectors. Investments such as bonds as well as stocks in companies in which offenders are not personally involved, were only found in a small number of cases. To put it differently: offenders usually stay close to home with their investments. Based on these results, the concept of social opportunity structure seems to be best suited to understand offenders’ investment choices.

All EU Member States developed anti-money laundering policies based on EU directives and FATF recommendations. While uniformity in this policy area is needed for international cooperation, the different countries are facing different money laundering challenges and interpret the goal of anti-money laundering policy quite differently. This article analyses the money laundering threat in each EU Member State and the effectiveness of the corresponding policy reaction. Furthermore, the authors identify four types of anti-money laundering policy in the EU and classify each country in one of the four types by using the statistical method of cluster analysis.