Recent sociological research and socio-political debates about socioeconomic inequality and social divisions urge legal scholars, criminologists, policy makers and practitioners to have a renewed discussion about the role of socioeconomic status of suspects and offenders in judicial decisions. If social divisions in Dutch society are deepening, we need to look anew at the possibility that injustices of the social structure affect legal rights and decisions about prosecution, sentencing and probation. This article intends to offer various starting points for debate and research.

Immigrants are overrepresented in Dutch crime rates and in forensic psychiatric care. The current research explored the relation between delinquency, psychiatric problems and ethnicity. General characteristics, judicial history and history of mental health care of male detainees which reside in a penitentiary psychiatric centre, have been investigated and the relation of these factors with ethnicity is examined. Results show that in particular second-generation non-western immigrants are highly represented. It seems that it had been more difficult for them to get adequate treatment.

Child safety is an important condition for the healthy development of children. Child maltreatment is an extensive problem in society with significant medical, emotional, cognitive, social and economic consequences. In policy-making, attention for this phenomenon has increased, resulting in new laws and measures. However, the Committee for Childs Rights of the United Nations formulated numerous recommendations for a better implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Netherlands. This article focuses on how child safety and children’s rights are related and explores the implementation of the convention, considering relevant new laws and scientific (field) research.

People have all kinds of dependency relationships, for example in family life and on the work floor. Since almost a decade, the Dutch government uses the term ‘violence in dependency relationships’ for all kinds of violence that are applied in these dependency relationships: domestic violence, honour-based violence, child abuse, abuse of the elderly, abuse by professionals for example in homes for children or the elderly and violence related to prostitution and the trafficking of humans. In this article an overview is given that demonstrates how in all these forms of violence elements of cybercrime can be recognized.