In these closing remarks on the scientific content of the 11th International Congress on Criminology, the president of the Scientific Commission of the international society for criminology first draws an analytical sketch of what the congress participants were dealing with in terms of focal concerns and more detailed topics of interest. In a second step, he asks where the congress is standing, in scholarly terms, in comparison to the recent development of thinking about crime and crime control in other parts of the scientific community.

After analysing the different discourses existing in criminology, the author discusses the relationships between criminology and penal policy, and between crime, politics, and economics. Arguing for having ideas better than knowing truths, and for transgressing the limits and borders of criminology, he looks at the hope of peoples who rather got a new economic order with its institutionalized indifference towards moral issues than a new moral and political order.

Among the central questions that a republican theory of criminal justice shows how to answer is what conduct should be criminalized and decriminalized. Conduct should only be criminalized if criminalization increases dominion—a republican conception of liberty. This motivates the republican to support substantial decriminalization in Western societies. While republicans take crime seriously, they agree that a great deal of the conduct we respond to as crime would be better responded to in the ways advocated by abolitionists—as troubles, problems of living, conflicts, matters for dialogue. There is no conflict between participating in progressive struggles to inject clarity into laws that protect women from rape or the environment from despoliation while declining to treat as crime particular instances of conduct that might fit the definition.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss methods and hypotheses of empirical comparative research on criminal behavior from the perspective of a Japanese criminologist. Referring to the title of van Wolferen’s book on The Enigma of Japanese Power, the author studies Japan as an ideal testing ground for any approach in comparative criminology : with an apparently contradictory combination of tremendous economic development and a consistently low crime rate, lower than those in most other developed countries, Japan still needs comparative research of three types : first, using data from a culture or country different from those where theories to be tested originated; second, confronting qualitative research focusing on only two or three cultures; third, comparing quantitative research involving a large number of cultures or countries.

This paper summarizes comments on professor Sherman’s paper, “Defiance and the Science of Criminal Sanction”, published in the former issue of the International Annals of Criminology, 31/1-2 (1993) pp. 79-93.

Although there is no solid scientific evidence supporting the claim that violence is a problem for society’s older population, violence against the elderly has become a popular research topic. Unfortunately, most of the studies have focused on the fashionable concept of “elder abuse” and suffer from the lack of an objective standardized definition, poor personalization, and inadequate sampling. Using the findings of different studies, this paper examines the types of violence committed against the elderly and tries to determine in what respect it is different from violence perpetrated against other age groups. The paper also tries to offer some theoretical explanations as to why it is that the elderly are less frequently victimized than others. Research on target selection, the life style model, the routine activity approach, as well as research on fear of crime provide the basic elements of this theoretical explanation.

In spring 1992 the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN) conducted a nationwide representative victim survey, entitled “Feelings of Personal Safety, Fear of Crime and Violence, Victimization of the Elderly”. When trying to unfold and conceptually rephrase the research questions implied in this title, the authors drew on concepts and findings from different research domains, e.g., criminal victimization, well-being, adjustive behavior, stress and coping, critical life events and justice. The first part of this paper sketches out some of the connections found between these domains of research. The second part summarizes first findings from the research. These findings relate to a structural analysis of events that are perceived to threaten feelings of personal safety. Knowing the structure of threatening events is a precondition for localizing criminal victimization relative to other forms of victimization.