The mother–child relationship is essential in the development of a healthy child, who can grow up trusting his/her own perceptions and understanding of the social environment. Teenagers naturally experience a period of transition in search of their own identity as individuals, thus being really exposed and vulnerable to being recruited by jihadists. In this particular stage of development, the teenager tries to free himself/herself from the tutorship of the family and looks to experience something new outside the family frame. One of the defining characteristics of this stage is a tendency to take things to an extreme and to see things in black and white, while emotions are experienced as very intense, overwhelming and sometimes difficult to control. Teenagers are easy to impress, convince and manipulate, especially by their social milieu outside the family of origin. In the cases when the relationship with the family of origin becomes tensed – whether the child has been neglected or spoiled during childhood, or when there are tensions between parents or the family is conflicting – the teenager looks for validation outside the family environment. Any opportunity to do something out of the ordinary and apparently easy to accomplish might seem attractive for this category of individuals, especially for those that do not enjoy family support. The illusion of becoming famous or the attraction of glamour might seem desirable at this age. This is one of the main reasons why Jihad has had such a significant impact on Western converts to Islam. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide an analysis of the case of Boicea Luigi Constantin (Umar al Rumaani), a Romanian that adhered to the extremist ideology of the Islamic State, who does not come from a Muslim family, yet underwent a fast self-radicalization process. In order to better understand Boicea’s case, we will try to present the result of the investigation conducted on the family environment, his interests manifested at an early age, and the tragic events that contributed to his radicalization; in other words, we will try to present the general context in which self-radicalization occurred.

This paper presents the empirical analysis from two Indian States to understand factors influencing the social reintegration of released prisoners. Samples of the study comprise 100 released prisoners who are currently under the probation system. The article identified stability in income, maintaining good relationships with the family and community, and membership in informal groups as four outcome variables of reintegration. The paper also identified seven factors – four factors concerning the stay at the prison and three factors concerning life after release – as capable of influencing the extent of reintegration. A reintegration index has been constructed to examine the relationship between reintegration and seven supporting factors that influence reintegration. The article also used a correlation matrix to analyse the relationship between the reintegration index and the contributing factors of reintegration. The paper suggests that factors such as visits by family members and probation officers and availing parole have a significant positive relationship, but that years of stay have a significant negative relationship with the reintegration of released prisoners.

Increasing female involvement in violent crime is a concern in Nigeria; still, it is unclear what informs this sudden surge in a society that supposedly socializes feminine gender to be soft, caring, and compassionate. This article explores the sociological profiles of women involved in armed robbery, drawing case examples from 32 convicts in a Nigerian female penitentiary. It was found that women were made susceptible to deviance by some social factors such as familial variables, neighborhood characteristics, gender discrimination, neglect, and violence. Both primary and secondary social groups were found to be major facilitators in the initiation into crime, development of criminal career, entry into armed robbery, and maintenance of life as a robber. This article concludes that gender-based inequality in all social facets and the unfavorable socio-economic conditions in Nigeria increase the vulnerability of women to be recruited into criminality. A revival of the family institution, gender-neutral parenting, government’s intervention for improvement of socio-economic wellbeing, and gender education are suggested.

Globally, questions have been asked on how police utilized additional powers created to manage the spread of the COVID-19 virus without negatively impacting police legitimacy. This was particularly a concern in countries that had hitherto recorded high incidents of police misconduct prior to the emergence of the pandemic. Using a victim-centered approach, a qualitative study was conducted to examine the dimensions of unlawful use of force, human rights violations, and other police misconduct which prevailed during the enforcement of the COVID-19 lockdown in Nigeria. In all, 82 interviews with victims of police violence were conducted, and a thematic analysis of the narratives was carried out. Findings indicate negative perceptions of police legitimacy to intervene in public health crises. In building better community relations that will engender public compliance with police directives, the police authority is advised to purge itself of its militarized system, with officers undergoing procedural justice training and imbibing its principles.

In recent years, transit routes in Vietnam for drug trafficking networks in the Southeast Asia region and beyond have expanded considerably. Many international scholars are working on identifying destination and transit routes of drug trafficking entities “to and through” Vietnam. Among these routes, the crossings through the Vietnam–Laos borderland of about 2,340 km are among the most severe concerns. This article analyses supply-and-demand scales of illicit drugs in Vietnam from 2008 to 2017 within the context of illegal drug trafficking in the mainland Southeast Asian region. Some evidence consistent with the “destination and transit route” arguments were found through mapping three main ways across the Vietnam–Laos borderland. The article also calls for enhancing the bilateral cooperation among law enforcement agencies to prevent and combat drug trafficking from the two sides.

Durante la última década se ha producido un número importante de estudios sobre la efectividad de las sanciones judiciales para reintegrar a delincuentes juveniles y los efectos de las prácticas correccionales en su reincidencia delictiva. El hallazgo común en la mayoría de aquellas investigaciones es que las medidas judiciales (generalmente denominadas medidas socioeducativas en el caso de menores infractores) aplicadas en ámbitos comunitarios son más efectivas que aquellas que se ejecutan en contextos de privación de la libertad. Aunque reconozcamos la importancia de favorecer el uso de sanciones judiciales en ámbitos comunitarios antes que el encarcelamiento -y por tanto estos hallazgos contribuyan a tal posición- estos estudios aparentemente no han tomado en cuenta los efectos de sesgo metodológico condicionados por la Administración de Justicia Criminal. En los ensayos aleatorios controlados, los sujetos son asignados al azar en los tratamientos a los que son sometidos. En la Justicia Criminal, existe un sesgo de selección atribuido al juez al momento de sancionar a un convicto con un tipo de sanción (de encarcelamiento o no), según el tipo de delito cometido o según las características de riesgo criminogénico de éste. Por tanto, concluir sobre la efectividad de una intervención sin tales controles metodológicos restringe la validez de sus resultados. Por otro lado, la efectividad de los programas de reintegración incorporados en las sanciones judiciales ha sido generalmente medida a través de las tasas de reincidencia de tales programas. Sin embargo, en la composición de la varianza de reincidencia explicada subyacen tanto los efectos atribuidos a los programas como a otras variables intervinientes que generalmente no son controladas dadas las limitaciones metodológicas de los diseños de investigación posibles de ejecutar en contextos judiciales. Tomando en cuenta los resultados de las revisiones sistemáticas y los meta-análisis desarrollados fundamentalmente por el Grupo Campbell, este artículo analiza el estado del arte reportado en la literatura internacional sobre la efectividad correccional y discute las discrepancias metodológicas de los estudios previos ante los nuevos hallazgos.

Artificial intelligence can bring benefits to legal practice, providing agility and precision. It can allow judicial decisions to be the result of the combination of algorithms, enabling the development of a system based on machine learning. This article seeks to demonstrate the current state of the use of artificial intelligence in the Brazilian justice system with the impact of the development of a deep learning system, merely the result of the automation of textual analyses of legal cases, which now serve as models. Reflection is more than necessary given the ethical issues that can arise in view of the inherent precepts that are usually impregnated in the judicial function. Civil servants, lawyers, prosecutors and judges should be guided by a pertinent regulation of new technologies and reflect on whether judicial decisions would be the result of human thinking or not, in addition to the risk that they can carry when the models are biased, in good or bad faith, due to erroneous classification or misinformation in the system.

As of the beginning of 2016, out of 100,000 “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS) fighters in Iraq, Syria, Sinai and North African Countries, one-third were foreign-born fighters from European and Asian countries (AFP Tunis 2013). Although most of the men came alone, seduced by advertised sexual adventures, the official guiding rule by the ISIS Caliphate was to establish true marriage with real Muslim brides (Milton and Dodwell 2018). The Western women were then addressed to come and help in administrative, teaching and nursing tasks while also instituting families with jihadi fighters. Estimations are that at least 450–500 Western women of different ages left their countries to join ISIS mujahedin. For these mobilization efforts, social networks were utilized to serve as means of communication, coordination and conversion of women’s minds. The skilled usage of different levels of social networking tools, combined with precise audience targeting, turned the efforts into powerful recruiting instruments for mobilization of women into terrorist activities. The ISIS strategy included careful selection of different scenarios and storyboards for different target audiences, thus maximizing the impact of the exposure to the message and mobilization.

Conducting experiments on humans may subject them to abuse and exploitation. The international community has developed principles, rules and norms that provide for safeguards against exploitative human experimentation. Recruiting a person by illegal means for illicit purposes has been criminalized as human trafficking. This article attempts, for the first time, to address human experimentation as a form of human trafficking. The article advocates for an expansive definition of the concept of human trafficking to include not only sex or labor but also medical or scientific tests that are conducted in violation of the law, also arguing that the international medical ethical principles, rules and norms may be more appropriately analyzed by using the three basic elements of a case of human trafficking, namely: (a) absence of consent; (b) abuse of a position of vulnerability; and (c) exploitation.

Research into sex trafficking is considerably lacking despite its increasing global relevance. The trafficking in human beings has been documented within the literature as a form of modern-day slavery. It is commonly described as a form of organized crime that is highly profitable, involving the active participation of corrupt officials, politicians, financial institutions and criminal networks that facilitate document forgery, illegal border crossings, money laundering and the return of escaped victims. This paper discusses the thematic network analysis of recently collected qualitative data on sex trafficking in Belize. Jennifer Attride-Stirling’s (2001) thematic network analysis was applied to data gathered from face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with four distinct groups within the sex industry: sex traffickers, sex workers, clients and knowledgeable locally based officials Given the expansive nature of this research, thematic network analysis has been advanced to accommodate the specificities of each group, creating what has been termed here as a supra-global theme. This innovative approach facilitates the emergence of a deeper, more pertinent understanding of the intrinsic realities characteristic of Belize’s sex industry and may be applied to similar multi-group research.

This paper develops an argument lightly sketched in our book Public Criminology? (2010). There we posed the question of what it would take for criminology to make a substantial contribution to the search for “a better politics of crime”. We were of course well aware of what some of our critics then informed us, namely that this was just a suggestion in need of much fuller articulation.

Here we begin by summarizing the position outlined in that book and some subsequent papers. We argue that criminology has indeed made some salient contributions to the search for a better politics, but the scale of that contribution has also been limited by some intellectual tendencies that draw energy and attention away from the kind of reconstruction that we propose.

In particular, the tone of some of the leading accounts of recent penal politics is grim — not without reason, as we freely acknowledge. If the trends with which we have become so familiar in some parts of the world — chronically high levels of incarceration, racial disproportion, demotic symbolic politics — flow either from core features of ‘late modernity’ or from inherent logics of neoliberal globalization, as some key contributors have insisted, then the prospects for changing these in any substantial and purposeful way, any time soon, seem rather slim. There have of course been reversals in the unremitting rise of mass incarceration recently. Are these more than temporary, reversible fluctuations? Are some of those who celebrate them clutching at straws?

It is not necessary to share such (perhaps premature) optimism to wish to promote a somewhat different and more hopeful form of analysis and engagement. Is there perhaps also an opposite tendency to depict some of these problems as so massive and intractable — the tendency that we here call ‘hype’ — as to deter us from practical intervention? This paper seeks to identify some resources that could contribute to the task of reconstructing our approaches to theorizing our institutions and practices of crime control. If criminology is to contribute more effectively to thinking about how we draw limits to state coercion and demand strict scrutiny over the threats to individual rights, human development, and civic dignity posed by institutionalized exclusion and stigmatization it will need access to a certain range of perspectives and to build (or re-build) some alliances. What kind of criminology is best suited to the challenge of developing penal practices and institutions fit for democratic societies?

Substance use in adolescence relates to other problems such as involvement in violence and mental/physical health problems. This study aimed to identify substance use patterns in a considerable sample of Brazilian adolescents and to estimate the magnitude of the relationship between each pattern and violence involvement indicators, as aggressor and/or as victim, and of mental and general health. The data analyzed were collected from 6702 schoolchildren, within the scope of the National Survey of School Health, employing latent class analysis for reports of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and crack cocaine use. The five groups identified were compared regarding their involvement in violence and mental and general health aspects. Abstainers (18%) would neither make use of substances, nor be involved in violence or display health problems. Drinkers (26%) would tend to only make use of alcohol, but would not display the other problems either. Conventional Drug Users (28%) would tend to make use of alcohol and tobacco or alcohol and marijuana and would also be involved in violence, but would not display health problems. Polysubstance Users (23%) would tend to make use of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana and would be more frequently involved in violence. Hard Drug Users (5%) would tend to make frequent use of all substances in addition to also being more involved in violence, both as aggressor and victim, and would display mental/general health problems. Our findings reveal different levels of problems and reinforce the importance of varied prevention/treatment policies in order to meet specific demands.

Fear of crime has always been a major topic in the popular media and for public policy. Consequences of fear of crime are salient for citizens' and the community's quality of life. Since the late 1970s, there has been a much scholarly attention paid to the role of disorder in producing fear of crime and further producing adverse community consequences. Particularly influential works were Wilson and Kelling's paper (1982) and Skogan's work (1990); these works greatly influenced public policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Greene and Taylor 1988; Ferraro 1994). The salient feature of this research is its emphasis on the role of community context, analyzing how disorder generates fear of crime and leads to community decline at the street block and neighborhood level. The impact of fear of crime extends beyond the victims of the crimes, and indicates the salience of the social aspect of fear of crime. Therefore, neighborhood effects are highly relevant to the understanding of fear of crime. Scholars have recognized that individuals' fear is better understood within a neighborhood or community context. The purpose of the present study is to build upon prior work to address critical questions of neighborhood effects on fear of crime under context of contemporary urban China. Using multilevel analyses of data from Tianjing, China, this paper found that neighborhood context variables have effect on fear of crime independent of individual characteristics.

Music plays an important role in both the right-wing extremist and the Salafi jihadist scenes as a unifying and radicalizing factor. It is used to share propaganda and highlight specific ideologies. Music is disseminated by various means, e.g. via social media, and used strategically to attract potential new members. The aims of right-wing extremist music and the Salafi jihadist nasheeds are, among other things, to inspire the youth, reach out to a worldwide audience of potential sympathizers, and disseminate their absolutist worldview. To achieve these goals, seemingly objective depictions of negative everyday experiences, of oppression, and the need for resistance are utilized. The songs are usually associated with violent content, and in conjunction with videos, they illustrate the perceived need to defend oneself. In this article, we will take a closer look at the content of four selected extremist songs. Our analysis of the content is based on a triangulation of sequential text analysis methods and identifies the differences and comparable elements of the ideologies in a final step. In addition to the content, the research aims to examine the possible effects of extremist groups’ music.

Techniques of neutralization have largely been used to explain the triadic relationship between cybercrimes, offenders and victims, while the possible involvement of the offenders’ social networks as accomplices has been ignored. Interviewing parents, a qualitative study of their children’s romance scam involvement was conducted in Nigeria, exploring the parents’ disposition towards their children’s delinquent behaviour. In all, 52 interviews were conducted, and a thematic analysis of the narratives was carried out. Findings indicated that parents’ initial opposition to cybercrimes and support for enforcing laws against perpetrators changed towards accepting their children’s involvement in romance fraud. Parents adopted their children’s neutralization techniques in accepting their deviance. These findings have important implications in understanding the depth of Internet scams and parents’ social expectations in controlling their children’s behaviours.

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown pushed several groups of traders to rely on cryptocurrency as one of the chosen tools for commercial transactions. India is no exception. Because of its notorious misuses by criminal gangs, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) declared cryptocurrency as derecognized. Consequently, the Indian parliament also created a draft bill titled Banning of Cryptocurrency & Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2019 (the Bill), which not only derecognizes the currency or the use of it for any commercial purposes, it also makes the investors, exchanges and agencies dealing with cryptocurrency criminally liable. Later, the Supreme Court of India in 2020 set aside the above-mentioned RBI guidelines banning cryptocurrency. But this has not nullified or suggested any amendment for the Bill. This article argues that due to this legal confusion, cryptocurrency investors, traders, exchanges and agencies, etc. have become guardian-less victims who may not be eligible to claim basic rights of victims as has been established by the United Nations Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power. In such a legal tangle, it is necessary to analyse the issues from cyber-victimological perspectives for providing functional suggestions for restitution of justice.

The narrative-based approach acts as the only tool capable of creating and assigning a meaning to individual life stories, linking individuals to their actions. The use of narrative as a reference frame for understanding the motive of the crime therefore offers an innovative perspective into criminology and its forensic application. Through the stories of the criminals and the victims, of society, and the world of justice as a whole, doing narrative criminology means listening to and accurately analysing criminal life stories to shed some light and meaning on the obscure elements of reality that from time to time take shape as a violent act. After a review of the most recent literature in the criminological narrative area, the present work analyses the role of the criminologist as an expert who provides an essential contribution during investigation and trial phases. Moreover, the work proposes the use of a narrative approach and the contribution of a narrative criminologist in two different moments of the criminal procedure: during the investigation phase, through a preventive methodological narrative training of forensic experts, with emphasis on team work, and in the trial phase through the use of criminological interviews to assess criminal liability and dangerousness.

Fear of crime has been the focus of fruitful criminological investigation for the last 50 years. Simultaneously, the literature related to intimate partner violence has also been developing. Empirical studies have neglected the association between fear of crime and violence committed in private spaces, so this research seeks to provide an integrated approach to these concepts. Using the data from the first Brazilian National Victimization Survey, this research aims to explore how fear of violence in intimate relationships is associated with both individual and macro-contextual variables, in an ecological framework as proposed by Heise. Statistical analyses were conducted by aggregating data, and the analytical model integrated both individual- and macro-level variables and took the fear of intimate partner violence as the outcome variable. The results demonstrate a strong association between the fear of intimate partner violence and the individual-level predictors tested, especially previous victimization as well as social inequality (Gini coefficient). This way, results indicate that fear of crime manifests its predictors far beyond what the dyad “victim–aggressor” may suggest.

This article is part of an effort to understand the enthusiasm, attraction and admiration of the organization “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS) among the young Muslim female in Western Europe. The article specifically focuses on microblogging (Tumblr and Twitter) contents of young Muslim girls from Western Europe. The study offers a review of ISIS-adoring Tumblr fangirls in the West through the prism of cultural interpretation. The young girls, whether themselves manipulated or manipulating others, become part of a worldwide viral system produced in perfect unison and generating propaganda enticing more and more young Muslim girls in the West to become viral ISIS recruits. After maintaining for a while Tumblr and Twitter accounts, some of them even undergo the “giant leap” and migrate to the “Islamic State” in Syria, continuing there to reinforce their blogging and twittering efforts, reporting on their daily lives and attempting to tempt or to trap more young girls to join the new “Islamic State”.