In cultural criminology, we talk about crimes as secrets and secrets as crimes. There is a close relationship between criminality and secrecy. The unravelling of secrets can help us discover the meaning criminals attach to their actions and contacts. Secrets have always been a topical issue, as they are strongly embedded in our social world. Secrecy used to be functional in times of war and under dictatorships as a symbol of political and/or religious protest. Today, however, secrecy is most often associated with illegality and criminality. It is not easy to study secrets and secrecy, and for this reason criminological research requires specific, mainly ethnographic, research methods.

The political far right French Vichy-regime or French State (1940-1944) criminalized freemasonry as a dangerous secret society using several state owned measures. In the tradition of the secret Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory a legal framework was established to criminalize and ban freemasonry, to dissolve the lodges and to remove individual freemasons from command positions. Intellectuals, former freemasons, public and private police and intelligence agencies helped the regime to establish an anti-Masonic documentation, exhibition and movie (Forces occultes) in order to show the French population the danger of freemasonry. A specialized police force (Service des sociétés secrètes) identified 60.000 freemasons, the names of 18.000 were published and 3.000 lost their jobs. 989 were brought to the extermination camps and 545 were shot immediately by private militias.

Approaching the night as a particular time and space for secret transgressions, this article examines the nightlife of Antwerp youth in the early twentieth century. Although this period saw increased official attempts to legally regulate ‘immoral’ nocturnal juvenile amusements, the police allowed most young people to move around unbothered at night, intervening only in major public order disturbances and handling most juveniles informally. Parents were more ‘efficient’, filing complaints with the juvenile judge on charges of ‘misconduct’, seeking to end familial financial troubles caused by heavy spending on nightlife. Working-class youth increasingly turned to the movies and dancing, in search for a secret ‘second life’ of pleasures away from conventional social and sexual codes, where they could belong and feel special.

This article examines the silence of control agents. It is often said that control agents as representatives of the risk society are obsessed with control activities and fact-finding, and that rule breakers are regularly exposed by negative publicity. The author takes the contrary position that even major cases demonstrate the persistence of silence on the part of control agents. He distinguishes between two types of silence: denial and secrecy. Denial means that control agents saw nothing while they could have discovered wrongdoing. He points to the fact that this denial in the face of knowledge is the result of sociological ambivalence: control agents are often forced to reconcile conflicting interests, which supersede the importance of supervision. The article shows that secrecy plays an important role in trust relationships between control agents and the objects of their supervision. Secrecy enables control agents to better obtain information. In effect, with regard to the supply of information and the scrutiny of the objects under supervision, control agents are dependent on the cooperativeness of the objects of supervision. These days, much emphasis is placed on breaking the walls of silence. Perpetrators, victims and witnesses, as well as control agents, are being encouraged to break the silence through the use of star witness arrangements, whistleblower arrangements, witness protection, and reporting centres. But is this effective? The author suggests that maintaining secrecy is essential and that those measures limit the space for control agents to develop trust relationships with the objects of supervision, and thereby the opportunity to engage in fact-finding.

André Köbben’s academic career spans sixty years and he’s still going strong – just because he likes it so much. Doing research by himself, which took him for longer periods to Ivory Coast and Surinam apart from studying conflicts in the Netherlands, but also analysing research by others. He has always been interested in questions of ‘rule’ and ‘reality’: the discrepancy between what people say they do and what they actually are doing. He probed tribal disputes among the Agni, the Bete and the Djoeka, but also conflicting interests between managers ordering research and researchers producing unwelcome results. He is preparing a book on academic fraud.

Kees Schuyt has written an extensive biography of the famous Dutch professor of criminology and literary polemicist of the 1960 in The Netherlands Willem Nagel. This colourful and controversial figure is dealt with as a fascinating mixture of Nagel’s life as lawyer, freedom fighter (against the German occupation during the Second World War), scientist and literary writer. Nagel’s original contribution to criminology is considered as somewhat less prominent than Schuyt would want to have it.

In 2011 it was revealed that the Dutch social-psychologist Diederik Stapel from Tilburg University faked his experiments and fabricated findings.Many of his PhD-students relied upon his statistical data and, as a result, their dissertations and publications have been qualified as fraudulent. Here I wilI focus mainly on gaining access to the PhD-students. I show that trust and distrust played an essential part in the communication with these respondents. Some of them state that the framing of Stapel as the evil mastermind is not coherent with their experience. They also define him as an enthusiastic and brilliant supervisor who was interested in their work.