In recent years, there has been a shift within animal ethics, in which animals are no longer seen purely as passive suffering subjects, but attention is also being paid to their role as agents. In this essay, we look at what that agency means and argue that in the Anthropocene animals are actually victimized in two ways: because their agency is literally curtailed by human actions and because at the knowledge level agency is taken away from them: we see them as victims even when they are not. In this text, we focus on zoo animals to illustrate how this works.

This article adopts German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of “as if” as a vehicle to sketch the main features of the emerging research domain of narrative victimology, as well as address some of its limitations. Vaihinger emphasizes the importance of useful untruths, i.e. things we know to be untrue, but nevertheless behave as if they are not, if that strengthens their use as instruments for us to find our way more easily in the world. This applies to our daily lives, but also to our societal institutions and the models and metaphors that underlie our approaches to (social) science. The paper argues that the narrative metaphor of the historical event is often more apt to enhance our understanding of victimological phenomena than that of the mechanism, which is the default metaphor of (social) science. The paper subsequently describes four areas of inquiry of narrative victimology: victimisation’s impact on (life) stories; narratives in the aftermath of victimization; narratives of victim’s experiences with justice processes and the coincidence and juxtaposition of the victims’ narrative with narratives of other significant parties. For all its merits however, the narrative metaphor is also a “useful untruth”, equipped with its own limitations, for instance the difficulty of language in describing first hand experiences of victims and the possibility that narrative structures will be imposed upon victim experiences.

This article examines expressions of conspicuous consumption on 19 recent releases by the most popular Dutch rap artists of 2018. In line with Veblen’s (1899/2017) notion of conspicuous consumption, our content analysis of these rap lyrics shows that Dutch rappers ‘spend’ their money on all kinds of ostentatious and eye-catching luxury goods such as designer clothing and jewelry (‘drip’), cars or holidays, but also that rappers ‘stack’ some of the money they earn by putting it aside. Our results indicate that these expressions of conspicuous consumption seem to be rooted in, and fueled by, experiences with poverty, stigmatization, and discrimination.

The lifeblood of contemporary consumer capitalism is ever-growing and accelerating human needs for new consumer goods and services. Needs that remain unsatisfied on the one hand but defy the carrying capacity of planet Earth on the other. Anything but a win-win situation. Although excess harms, the infrastructure of consumption pays full service to perpetuate and cultivate the ‘more and faster’ orientation of today’s consumers. It is believed that we can cope with excess by taking efficiency measures and paying attention to recycling and refurbishing. This article, however, points out that there is need to rethink consumption and reconsider prevalent orientations dedicated to excess consumption more fundamentally.

The overexploitation of nature has led to anthropogenic defaunation, which results in complex socioeconomic, political and ecological consequences. Influenced by the economic growth of modernization and the interconnectedness of globalization, zoonotic diseases emerge as incalculable side effects of defaunation. By rejecting anthropocentric worldviews, this article critically examines anthropogenic defaunation and the causes and consequences of the coronavirus pandemic from a green criminological perspective.

Multi-national corporations are increasingly facing attention and disapproval by different actors, including authorities, public and (non-) commercial organizations. Digital globalization and especially social media as a low-cost, highly interactive and multidirectional platform shape a unique context for this rising attention. In the literature, much attention has been devoted to top-down approaches and strategies that corporations use to avoid stigmatization and sanctioning of their behaviour. Reactions to corporate harm are, however, seldom researched from a labelling perspective. As a result, corporations are not considered as objects towards whom labelling is targeted but rather as actors who hamper such processes and who, as moral entrepreneurs, influence which behaviour is labelled deviant. Based on theoretical analysis of literature and case studies, this article will discuss how the process of labelling has changed in light of the digitalized, late-modern society and consequently, how the process should be revisited to be applicable for corporate deviance. Given a diversification of moral entrepreneurs and increasingly dependency of labelling and meaning-making on the online sphere, two new forms of labelling are introduced that specifically target institutions; that is bottom-up and horizontal labelling.

Bill Cosby, Jimmy Savile and Gerrit Achterberg lived in different periods, in the US, UK, and the Netherlands. They were heroes because of what they accomplished during their professional careers but all three turned out to have committed serious crimes. Disclosure is painful, not only for the hero who comes to fall but also for the community that finds itself redefining moral standards when losing a celebrated insider. For this reason, the crimes of these three men have been concealed and kept secret for years. In comparing the three cases, this article tries to find out who decides on keeping the hero on his feet, how this is done, and if this changes over time.

In the introductory article of this special issue on ‘moral entrepreneurs’ in the 21st century, we situate different notions of moral entrepreneurship. Particularly foregrounding Howard Becker’s definition, we discuss its origins and use in subsequent research. The question that we’ve put forward in the ‘call for papers’ for this special issue is to what extent the notion is relevant in contemporary research and who is considered as ‘moral entrepreneur’. The research papers discuss ‘entrepreneurial’ practices of university ethic commissions, medical professionals, police officers and the leaders of cannabis social clubs. We conclude that the underlying rationales and discourses of moral entrepreneurs that the authors identify, reflect contemporary neoliberal ideals.

Cultural Criminology (CC) is one of the most recent and exciting developments in criminological theory. Its main argument is that mainstream criminological theories provide inadequate explanations of crime due to epistemological and theoretical flaws. CC’s alternative involves assuming a phenomenological and interpretative approach that focuses on the cultural and emotional components of crime. In this article I shall argue that although CC makes a valid demand for more realistic and complex explanations of crime, its own alternative needs to deal with two main challenges referred to its conceptualization of explanation and emotion. First, two problematic antagonisms should be avoided: understanding vs. causal explanation; and universal nomothetic explanations as opposed to ideographic descriptions. Considering recent developments in philosophy of social science, particularly the ‘social mechanisms approach’, CC should focus on explaining retrospectively through identification of specific causal mechanisms rejecting universal and predictive pretensions. Second, although cultural criminologists rightly question the emotionless character of criminological explanations, they lack an articulated alternative conceptualization of emotions to explain crime. A more refined concept needs to be elaborated in dialogue with recent advances in social sciences.

This paper focuses on the practice of youth justice (termed ‘youth protection’ in Belgium) in which professional actors ascribe deviant behaviour of youngsters to different cultural and migration backgrounds. Intra-European Roma migrants and refugees from the Northern Caucasus in Belgium are chosen as case studies. Discourse analysis of 55 youth court files and 41 expert interviews with professional actors show that deviant behaviour of these young people is explained in different manners. Two discourses are identified: ‘criminal vagabonds’ and ‘war torn children’. These discourses and their effects in practice differ tremendously for both groups. The broader discussion this article touches upon is the selective inclusion and exclusion in the institutions of formal social control, through social practices of culturalisation.

The article examines the public debate about New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2015. Theoretical starting point is the idea that public debates are forms of social communication in which reality is produced and social events become meaningful. On the basis of a framing analysis, it is investigated what significance New Year’s Eve in Cologne has as a medial event for society. The question here is how the event is described and explained, how it is mentioned and interpreted, what significance it collectively receives and how these insights can be theoretically interpreted. The analysis shows that different frames were possible, such as the problematization of the work of the police. Instead, the discourse focused on the sexual behaviour of refugees and securitization and sexualisation of migration takes place.

Changing ecological conditions in a globalizing world pose new challenges for human societies. Global warming, large-scale pollution, deforestation and species extinction have increasingly become topics on the international agenda. Even though many of these harmful activities are criminogenic, criminology pays rather little attention to environmental crimes and harms.
Therefore, this article discusses the anthropocentric perspective within criminology and argues that a non-anthropocentric criminology can lead to new theoretical insights.

Criminology has come under the spell of thinking negatively about safety and security. It’s focus merely lies on themes such as control, punishment and exclusion. Much interest therefore goes to public policing, private security, CCTV camera’s, anti-social behaviour orders, gated communities and prisons. Of course, this definition of security and security governance as the protection of citizens against crime and disorder must not be rejected out of hand. Without a minimum level of security, society would fall apart in chaos and despair. At the same time, however, we feel increasingly uncomfortable about the dominance of current negative – control and risk-oriented – approaches to (in)security as they overlook positive interpretations associated with trust, community and care. This introduction therefore provides an overview of academic literature that nuance, counter or resist hegemonic and negative meanings of security. In so doing, our aim is to introduce a positive turn in criminology’s interests and concerns regarding crime and disorder problems.

This paper presents the results of a study on Street Pastors in Cardiff, capital city of Wales. Street Pastors are Christian volunteers who look after (intoxicated) people in the nightlife district. In so doing, they provide security through empathy and care. The motives of Street Pastors to engage with partygoers are multi-layered, but their personal faith appears as a key explanation. A certain kind of orthodox ‘certitude’ of being safe (and saved) in a Higher Power gives the pastors their strength to go out on the street, face the unknown and feel compassion for their fellow citizens.

Since the nineties, the ‘Moroccan community’ experiences a negative group-image based on a small group of male youths who ‘stand out’ in social problems such as nuisance, crime and Islamic radicalisation. This negative group image is largely constructed through negative societal reactions in the media on incidents in which Moroccan Dutch youngsters play a prominent role. This article examines such negative societal reactions in the media on three recent incidents: the 2007 Slotervaart riots, the 2008 Gouda ‘bus incident’ and the 2010 Culemborg riots. It concludes that the societal reactions to these incidents in the media, are exaggerated, symbolise ‘the Moroccans’ as folk devils and construct them as moral and cultural Others. Finally, it concludes that these negative societal reactions to ‘Moroccans’ in Dutch media can be seen as a disproportional and misplaced, but natural reaction of a dominant cultural majority to a threat to their cultural and moral hegemony, by ‘the Moroccans’ as a social deviant minor­ity.

While in the sixties hackers were the heroes of cyberspace, they are nowadays often perceived as the archetype cybercriminal. From the perspective of labelling theory, this empirical study examines how hackers feel perceived by society at large, how they perceive themselves as ‘others’ and how they view themselves in relation to ‘others’. Our research shows that hackers – despite of an experienced negative labelling – view themselves as positive ‘others’. We conclude that the features of the hacking phenomenon itself (skillset, mindset, own morality) in combination with the digital context in which they operate, enable hackers to avoid a ‘spoiled identity’.

Newark Penn Station is the most frequented train station in New Jersey, United States. Two distinct groups occupy this public space. First are the commuters who travel by the trains to reach destinations for work or pleasure. Second are the transient who do not use the trains but instead remain in and around the station for various reasons, otherwise known as the ‘other.’ The latter population is closely monitored and controlled by law enforcement through a variety of written and unwritten laws and codes of conduct, which are based on broken windows theory and crime prevention through environment design (CPTED). The primary focus is how the ‘other’ seemingly navigates and occupies public space. Through ethnographic research, this paper reflects and reveals the ways in which the station is a living social organism that simultaneously marginalizes and incorporates those defined as the ‘other’ into this space. This complex and contradictory dynamic illustrates the interactions between public spaces and its occupiers and regulators.

This article is based on ethnographic research over recent years in eight Dutch police teams. It focuses on the othering process in which police officers define ‘crooks’ as the Other and chase, catch and arrest them. Catching crooks is perceived as an assignment as well as a game. Street cops construct detailed subcategories of the crook which influence their daily practices. They select crooks by recognition (the permanent suspects), by abnormalization (out of placeness) and by profiling (regardless of place). In addition to the discussion on ethnic profiling, we argue that profiling is a contextual practice. The contents of the profiles depend on the demographic characteristics of the district in which a police team operates. Interacting mediaframes of both the crook and the police reinforce the mutual caricatures and tense relationships.