This special issue focuses on the role of sex/gender in Dutch and Belgian criminological and penological research and theory. This introductory article draws the history of thought and research within Dutch-language criminology and explores international developments, in particular the influence of feminist critique on theory and research.This framework serves the positioning of the other contributions, on the one hand research exploring the differences in crime between men and women and on the other hand empirical and theoretical articles focusing on (the social construction of) gender. Finally some innovative methodological findings will be discussed, also with regard to future criminological research.

The backgrounds of the female vagabonds and beggars at the end of the 19th century show that contrary to their male counterparts, these females originated almost exclusively from the lower echelons of society. Their professions and those of their parents and husbands were low and ill-paid. Disease was prevalent, mortality was high and many of them had physical or psychological problems. Most of them were single and 25 percent had children out of wedlock. 20 Percent was convicted for mostly minor crimes. Because of their behaviour it is likely that they were not accepted by their family and received no support from the church or other institutions for relief of the poor. To beg and get convicted to RWI-placement may have been their only remaining survival strategy once they were old and ill.

Over 700 students judged fictitious descriptions of court cases, in which the gender of the offender was systematically varied, as well as a number of aspects pertinent to theories that explain disparities in sentencing between females and males. The results show that females indeed received shorter sentences than males, and that this difference could be attributed to the fact that male student-judges gave women shorter sentences and differential sentencing for violent crimes. We found mixed support for the chivalry as well as for the perceptual shorthand theory. More research is needed, in more realistic settings, to explain gender differences in sentencing.

Two explanations can be found for the unequal geographical concentrations of avoidance behaviour: (1) the demographic composition of residential areas, and (2) the social and structural contextual effects of residential areas. Different studies all over the world have shown that women report more fear of crime than men. In this article we study contextual as well as individual determinants of avoidance behaviour for men and women separately to gain a better insight in the explanation of individual differences in avoidance behaviour. The theoretical framework of this study is derived from the collective efficacy theory. In the present study a contextual model was tested on a 2009 survey of 2,080 residents from 40 municipalities in Flanders (Belgium), by using block-wise multilevel analyses on data from the Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders Survey (SCIF-survey), the Security Monitor and the registered crime statistics. The results indicate that economic disadvantage in the residential area increases the risk on avoidance behaviour both for men and women, because these areas often have high disorder and violent crime rates. With regard to the social ecology of crime this study shows that more research is needed on the differences in contextual effects of structural area characteristics on avoidance behaviour.

In this article, an ongoing Flemish qualitative research on life histories and criminal careers of women in prison is discussed. We conducted autobiographical interviews with 40 female prisoners aged between 20 and 69 years. Considering our target group, we didn’t always succeed in conducting an autobiographical interview. In practice we often conducted a classic open in-depth interview. By means of file analysis, we reconstituted the criminal career of every interviewed woman. Thanks to the retrospective approach we could reveal a diversity of trajectories. We identified three pathways: (1) youth offenders, (2) early adult-onset offenders and (3) late adult-onset offenders. Remarkably, quite a lot of women are late starters. Three risk factors – to a greater or lesser extent – play a role in these pathways: a problematic educational situation in childhood, drugs and negative love affairs.

Rape drugs (or drink spiking) discourse reflects gender stereotypes in a much more differentiated way than previous studies suppose. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of news items and online discussions proved stereotypes of ideal female victims and male perpetrators to be most prominent in news media. Postings to online bulletin boards were more skeptical about the alleged victims’ innocence and truthfulness. Studies in this area that focus on news media and institutional discourse overestimate the predominance of the ideal victim stereotype. In order to correct this bias, the authors urge criminologists to be more attentive to the relevance and power of informal crime stories and discussions, particularly those appearing in social media.

White-collar crime is mostly committed by men. It remains to be seen if this will stay this way. Increasing numbers of women succeed in attaining management positions in organizations. Could we therefore expect an increase in female white-collar crime?Criminological theories on female crime and on white-collar crime lead to contradicting hypotheses.Research on white-collar and organizational crime predominantly produces a situational hypothesis explanation according to which we could expect that the rise of women in organizational hierarchies will also bring more female white-collar crime.Research on female delinquency might lead to an opposite gender-difference hypothesis that would predict less white-collar crime, because they have a lesser tendency to show risky behavior.In this article, both assumptions will be elaborated for further research, against the background of possible gender bias in the relation between women and white-collar crime.

Gender, in criminological research, often refers to women. Although ‘masculinities’ and crime have been intertwined internationally for more than two decades, this isn’t so for Dutch research. Based on this international critique, this article introduces the masculinities approach in Dutch penology. Prisons are generally considered as hypermasculine settings (Toch, 1998), but this hypothesis is seldom explored within a gender framework. Nevertheless, ‘doing masculinity’ is an important coping strategy for male prisoners (Jewkes, 2005). This gap is tackled on two levels: (1) the conceptualization of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and (2) a critical, masculinity-oriented analysis of the existing knowledge on prison life, prison culture and prison hierarchy. It aims to tackle prison masculinity stereotypes, since traditional penal insights aren’t necessarily valid from a gender point of view (Evans & Wallace, 2008). Therefore, we conclude by analyzing the value of masculinity studies for penology.