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Criminologists have been interested in educational attainment for decades, a focus the field shares with virtually all other social and psychological sciences. The effects of formal schooling are expected to emerge across a host of developmental outcomes, but they are thought to be of particular relevance when assessing the risk of delinquency and crime. As time spent in formal schooling increases, the future risk of criminal offending is expected to fall precipitously. Associations between education and criminal outcomes have emerged repeatedly in the past, but evidence of causaleffects remains in short order by comparison. In this study, register data from the Netherlands is used to examine the effects of educational attainment on offending in both adolescence and early adulthood. Using a population-wide discordant sibling design, our results are consistent with an argument that both education exposure and educational performance exert causal influences on criminal involvement. Until additional work of a similar nature is carried out, however, stronger assertions about the causal effects of education and crime remain premature.

Human trafficking, among which domestic sex trafficking, is often only understood from the perspective of the victim, since research on traffickers — and in particular on their criminal careers — hardly exists. This is unfortunate, given that the wealth of longitudinal criminal career research on other offender populations has resulted in important theoretical and practical insights. This study therefore examines the offending trajectories of 630 domestic sex traffickers who were brought to court in the Netherlands, based on longitudinal judicial data. The results show that they are a heterogeneous and versatile offender group, similar to general offenders. A group-based trajectory analysis identified four subgroups following different offending trajectories between ages 12 and 35. Low-rate offenders(36%) start their criminal career late, mostly in adulthood, and for a relatively large share of them human trafficking is their first offense. Early-peak offenders(28%) are the youngest human traffickers and late-peak offenders(21%), after a slow start, do not seem to desist from offending on a regular base in adulthood. High-rate-persistent offenders(15%) have the youngest age of onset of crime in general and account for 40% of all criminal cases. On average, they have already more than 20 criminal cases registered against them, before committing human trafficking. This most problematic subgroup seems to be larger among domestic sex traffickers, than among general offenders. More research on criminal careers of domestic sex traffickers (and human traffickers in general) is needed, and should also focus on risk and protective factors that influence their offending trajectories.

People tend to disclose personal identifiable information (PII) that could be used by cybercriminals against them. Often, persuasion techniques are used by cybercriminals to trick people to disclose PII. This research investigates whether people can be made less susceptible to persuasion by reciprocation (i.e., making people feel obligated to return a favour) and authority, particularly in regard to whether information security knowledge and positive affect moderate the relation between susceptibility to persuasion and disclosing PII. Data are used from a population-based survey experiment that measured the actual disclosure of PII in an experimental setting (N= 2426). The results demonstrate a persuasion–disclosure link, indicating that people disclose more PII when persuaded by reciprocation, but not by authority. Knowledge of information security was also found to relate to disclosure. People disclosed less PII when they possessed more knowledge of information security. Positive affect was not related to the disclosure of PII. And contrary to expectations, no moderating effects were found of information security knowledge nor positive affect on the persuasion–disclosure link. Possible explanations are discussed, as well as limitations and future research directions.

A growing amount of research suggests that members of a mating couple tend to be similar to each other across a range of phenotypes. Mating couples, for instance, often evince similar levels of antisocial, violent, and aggressive behaviors. Whether this type of similarity extends across measures of chronic and non-chronic forms of criminality has been considerably less scrutinized. This study examines whether persistent offenders seek out mates who engage in higher levels of offending. All 180,379 officially registered couples of which both partners were born in the Netherlands between 1984 and 1990 were included in the sample. Data drawn from the Dutch Police were used to examine suspected criminal behavior between the ages of 12 and 30 years old. Individuals belonging to certain offender groups were more likely to select partners from that same group. Moreover, the timing, frequency, and nature of criminal behavior of couples correlated positively. Results further revealed support for both assortative mating and behavioral contagion as explanations for mate similarity in criminality. We discuss the implications of our work for the study of intergenerational and life-course study of criminal behavior.

Purpose: Cybercrime rates have increased rapidly during the last couple of decades, resulting in cybercrimes becoming common crimes. However, most victims do not report cybercrimes to the police. Therefore, this study examines reporting cybercrime victimization and provides insights into the role of the police in this process. Design/methodology/approach: A sample of 595 individuals was used. All respondents were shown three vignettes about hypothetical cybercrime victimization and were asked to imagine that this situation happened to them. Four crime and reporting characteristics were manipulated across vignettes. Respondents' intentions to report to the police and to other organizations were used as the dependent variables in regression analyses. Four random factors in the vignettes (i.e. type of crime, seriousness of crime, victim–perpetrator relationship, and reporting modality), as well as several characteristics of the respondents were included in the regression models as independent variables. Findings: The type of cybercrime is the most important predictor for reporting behaviors. Other determinants are: more serious offenses were more often reported and offenses are less often reported in situations where the victim personally knows the perpetrator. Furthermore, there is large discrepancy between intended and actual cybercrime reporting. These findings provide valuable insights into the factors that influence reporting behavior in the real world. Only a fifth of respondents indicated that they would not report cybercrime victimization to the police. This implies that attempts at improving reporting rates should not solely be focused on improving people's attitudes, but also on removing obstacles to turn these attitudes into actions. Originality/value: In the current study, the authors contribute to the existing literature by asking a large sample from the general population in the Netherlands about both their intended reporting behavior (i.e. a vignette study) and their actual reporting behavior (i.e. self-reports) of victimization of a wide variety of different types of cybercrime. Determinants of both reporting to the police as well as to other organizations are examined. Moreover, respondents are asked about motivations behind their decision to (not) report a cybercrime to the police. Last, people were asked about their past experiences with reporting cybercrime victimization to the police.

Family members resemble each other in their propensity for aggression. In twin studies, around 50% of the variance in aggression can be explained by genetic influences. However, if there are genotype-environment correlation mechanisms, such as environmental manifestations of parental and sibling genotypes, genetic influences may partly reflect environmental influences. In this study we investigate the importance of indirect polygenic score (PGS) effects on aggression.

A vast and growing body of research has shown that crime tends to run in families. However, previous studies focused only on traditional crimes and research on familial risk factors for cyber offending is very scarce. To address this gap in the literature, the present study examines the criminal behavior of the family members of a sample of cyber offenders prosecuted in the Netherlands. The sample consists of 979 cyber offenders prosecuted for computer trespassing between 2001 and 2018, and two matched groups of 979 traditional offenders and 979 non-offenders. Judicial information and kinship data from Dutch Statistics were used to measure criminal behavior among family members. Both traditional offenders and cyber offenders were found to be more likely to have criminal fathers, mothers, and siblings than non-offenders. Additional analyses, however, showed different patterns between cyber offenders who were only prosecuted for cyber offenses and those who also committed traditional crimes. While the former group of cyber offenders were similar to non-offenders in terms of family offending, the latter group of cyber offenders were more similar to traditional offenders. Overall, these results suggest that the traditional mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of crime can only partially explain cybercrime involvement.

This study examines the relationship between poor physical health and exposure to family member incarceration. Longitudinal data (2001–2015) from an Australian nationally representative household-based panel study was used (177,312 observations within 26,572 respondents). Hybrid random-effects models showed a strong correlation between poor physical health and family member imprisonment. However, this strong association can be explained for a large part by differences between individuals, since the association of physical health with within-individual changes in family member imprisonment was considerably lower. Nevertheless, the within-individual analyses showed that male sample members were significantly more likely to experience physical health problems in years in which they experienced family member imprisonment, compared to years in which they did not. This association was not found among females. Moreover, no effect of parental imprisonment on the physical health of young sample members was found.

Longitudinal criminological studies greatly improved our understanding of the longitudinal patterns of criminality. These studies, however, focused almost exclusively on traditional types of offending and it is therefore unclear whether results are generalizable to online types of offending. This study attempted to identify the developmental trajectories of active hackers who perform web defacements. The data for this study consisted of 2,745,311 attacks performed by 66,553 hackers and reported to Zone-H between January 2010 and March 2017. Semi-parametric group-based trajectory models were used to distinguish six different groups of hackers based on the timing and frequency of their defacements. The results demonstrated some common relationships to traditional types of crime, as a small population of defacers accounted for the majority of defacements against websites. Additionally, the methods and targeting practices of defacers differed based on the frequency with which they performed defacements generally.