A revision of the Dutch vice law is to be expected, amongst others with regard to sex between minors. The current standard requires such contacts to be in violation with the social view, indicating that the minor’s perspective is subdue to the majority opinion. Applying the legal standard of ‘indeceny’ (‘ontuchtig’), the judiciary are left with room for interpretation. In order to grant minors more sexual autonomy and to further legality, the legislator wants to change the criterion, opting for the standard of ‘other than in an equal relationship’. This begs the question whether this will solve the interpretive issues that flow from such open criteria. In order to predict whether the standard of ‘other than in an equal relationship’ will contribute to clarify the issues of legality, the jurisprudence with regard to the standard of ‘indecency’ was analyzed in order to learn which variables are applied by the magistracy.

This article builds on two previous publications in this journal on the topic of the role of the parents of misbehaving children. We previously concluded that the family plays an important role in ending crime among young people. More recently, we sharpened that conclusion on the basis of long-term monitoring of a large group of young repeat offenders: they don’t stop because their parents say so. The role of the parents turned out to be much more fragile. This article aims to offer an extra insight into the complexity of the relationship between education and crime based on three recent cases.

This study investigates daytime activities in clients at the Dutch Probation Service for addicted offenders (SVG). The article describes daytime activities, including work, based on official registrations of 9717 clients and an additional selection of client file study for 50 clients. The majority of the population does not have structural daytime activities, and within this group, substance use problems are slightly more prevalent. This study identifies four subgroups of clients without daytime activities: job seekers, work-incapacitated clients, motivated unemployed clients, and unmotivated unemployed clients. There is some heterogeneity between subgroups in terms of different background problems.