BACKGROUND:Sex workers experience disproportionately high levels of victimization, specifically violent and property-related offenses. However, victimological theory and empirically tested prevention strategies tailored to this population remain limited. While traditional frameworks, such as lifestyle and routine activity theories, provide population-level explanations, they insufficiently capture the structural, situational, and cumulative risks faced by highly vulnerable groups. METHODS:This study presents the protocol for a mixed-methods, longitudinal quasi-experiment conducted in the Swiss cantons of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, where no targeted victimization prevention programs for sex workers exist at time of implementation. The project pursues two objectives: first, to identify risk factors and victimization trajectories in order to refine victimological theory; and second, to evaluate the effectiveness of a tailored, needs-based prevention program. Co-developed with sex workers and stakeholders, the intervention integrates a multi-level approach based on sensitization, crime prevention, legal education, and psychosocial support.By combining longitudinal and quasi-experimental methods, the study aims to advance victimological theory and provide critical evidence to inform practice, policy, and scalable prevention efforts.

PURPOSE:This scoping review investigates crime victimization prevention interventions among sex workers. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Using the PRISMA method, we reviewed 11 papers referring to 8 studies that targeted the reduction of sex workers' victimization. RESULTS:Effective strategies identified include community mobilization, peer-led outreach, establishment of safe spaces, legal empowerment, sociocultural activities, financial literacy training, and alcohol harm reduction initiatives. These approaches demonstrated significant reductions in victimization, improvements in community cohesion, and enhanced access to essential resources and support systems, thereby promoting the safety and well-being of sex workers. However, several challenges were also identified, such as high attrition rates, contamination, underreporting due to stigma, and variability in effectiveness across different socio-cultural and geographic contexts. CONCLUSION:Despite the potential of these interventions, further research is needed, particularly from a criminological perspective, to better understand how these strategies can be refined and applied to improve the safety and well-being of sex workers.

The European Roma population faces violence and discrimination, but the causes of their victimisation are not well understood. This study used a multi-theoretical framework to analyse data from a representative sample of 2,913 Roma surveyed in European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey II. The results showed that police stops perceived as ethnically motivated, exposure to risky situations, and acceptance of violence when insulted predicted physical victimisation and harassment. To reduce victimisation, recommendations include sensitising police officers, diverse police patrols, crime-reduction measures in neighbourhoods, and education on nonviolent communication. Further research is needed to understand other forms of victimisation among the Roma. The study highlights the usefulness of testing multiple risk factors from different criminological theories to address victimisation of the Roma ethnic minority.

Cette étude examine l’impact des évènements traumatiques subis durant l’enfance et l’adolescence (ETEA) sur les facteurs de risque liés à la délinquance sexuelle à l’âge adulte. Elle se base sur un échantillon canadien de 256 individus judiciarisés pour des crimes sexuels au Canada. Les résultats suggèrent que la présence, la durée et la diversité des ETEA sont associées à différents degrés à des comportements problématiques pendant l’adolescence, aux troubles de la personnalité et à des cognitions favorables aux crimes. Une association notable a été identifiée entre la durée des ETEA et l’abus de substances. Une grande diversité d’ETEA est liée à un risque accru d’engagement dans des carrières criminelles violentes et sexuelles. Ces résultats soulignent la nécessité d’adopter une approche multidimensionnelle dans l’étude des conséquences des ETEA et ouvrent des perspectives concernant la prise en charge d’enfants et adolescents victimes d’évènements traumatiques ainsi que des individus judiciarisés.

AbstractResearch with sex workers presents a series of methodological and ethical challenges that need careful consideration. Sex workers are a heterogenous group that has been studied by criminologists mostly in countries where sex work is illegal. Here, we address the methodological and ethical considerations of conducting research as an early career researcher and research practitioner in Switzerland, a country where sex work is legal. Based on three studies between 2017 and 2021 with roughly 140 sex workers, we discuss the need for pragmatism and adaptation to the study’s population. We argue that the researcher or research team needs to cover linguistic and ethnic requirements to access the participants and the figure of researcher–practitioner might allow both the deep understanding of the context and the higher acceptance of the research by the sex workers. Observations, interviews, and surveys are complementary, and they need adaptation. The safety of the researcher and the participants, flexibility, and emotional intelligence are vital topics to be discussed in protocols that address the research with sex workers.

Movements such as #MeToo have shown how an online trend can become the vehicle for collectively sharing personal experiences of sexual victimisation that often remains unreported to the criminal justice system. These social media trends offer new opportunities to social scientists who investigate complex phenomena that, despite existing since time immemorial, are still taboo and difficult to access. They also bring technical difficulties, as the challenge to identify reports of victimisation, and new questions about the characteristic of the events, the role that victimisation testimonies play and the capacity to detect them by analysing their characteristics. To address these issues, we collected 91,501 tweets under the hashtag #MeTooInceste, posted from the 20 to 27 January 2021. A model was fitted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation that detected 1688 tweets disclosing experiences of child sexual abuse, with an accuracy of 91.3% [± 3%] and a recall of 93.1% [± 5%]. We performed Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations on the tweets identified as disclosures of victimisation and found that long tweets posted by users with small accounts, without URL or picture, were more likely to be related to disclosure of child sexual abuse. We discuss the possibilities of these trends and techniques offer for research and practice.

Except for the knowledge that the Roma people endure harsh conditions and are victims of discrimination, scarce criminological research has given detailed attention to further victimisation or offending among the Romanies. Identifying articles in the browsers Web of Science, Google Scholar and Google, we reviewed European publications (1997-2020) in English, French, Romanian or Spanish that addressed the Roma's victimisation or offending. The 44 studies that matched our criteria suggested that (1) Roma people are victims of hate crimes with devastating consequences; (2) Roma children and women are victims of domestic violence to a greater degree than other groups, although the Roma tend to oppose violence against women; (3) forced early marriages exist among some Romanies and may cause serious problems in adulthood; (4) youth delinquency among the Roma does not differ from that of the non-Roma, although Roma adolescents face more deprivation; (5) Roma men and women are overrepresented in prison and face many difficulties in re-entering society once they are released and (6) there are organised criminal activities in some Roma groups that are supported by their community. Further rigorous post-positivist research, particularly quantitative, is needed to generalise the findings and replicate former studies. Areas of special interest are the causes of anti-Roma discrimination other than ethnicity, the victimisation of children, the Roma's lack of institutional trust and the relation between victimisation and offending. Conducting comparisons with the general population is essential, and we propose that victims' surveys and self-reported delinquency studies include questions on ethnicity.

While European borders were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe witnessed the exodus of Romanian seasonal workers to Germany. Although both countries’ governments agreed to allow this under the condition of the strictest adherence to the sanitary restrictions and workers’ rights, soon after, the media began to report situations of non-adherence to the coronavirus-related measures and workers’ labor rights. Following the theoretical framework of the Routine Activities Approach and its updates, this case study combines the collection of press material (N=140), Facebook posts (N=93), and interviews with seasonal workers in agriculture (N=5) and identifies the exploitative behaviors and actors involved. The results suggest that the perpetrators of these behaviors were certain intermediaries as well as farmers. The seasonal workers most at-risk were those with poor literacy who had not mastered the German language, were financially precarious, and were unwilling to seek the authorities’ help. The spaces in which the exploitation occurred were cyberspace or isolated rural farms. Seven guardians and seven super-controllers played a considerable role in protecting the workers on the farms, but not during the recruitment process. Situational prevention techniques, such as the creation of a mobile application to inform workers of their rights and allow them to report violations remotely, and collaboration with online platform services to flag fraudulent job advertisements automatically are proposed.

The article uses threshold models —as developed by Bruce (2008, 2012) and adapted by Maldonado-Guzmán et al. (2020)— to measure whether the number of femicides recorded in each country in 2020 differed significantly from the average number recorded from 2017 to 2019. However, due to a misinterpretation of the formula proposed by Maldonado-Guzmán et al. (2020), there is a mistake in the estimation of the Z-scores. Concretely, the formula applied in the article is based on the weighted standard deviation and includes the year 2020, when it should have been based on the standard deviation and exclude that year. Consequently, the last two paragraphs of the section Data Analysis (pages 626-627) should read as follows:

AbstractPreceding these conclusions are the experiences of 55 researchers from 40 Universities and research centers across four continents. These scholars have accumulated a collective experience of over 700 years in fieldwork, starting as early as the 1980s. Rather than a mere compilation of authors’ experiences, we aimed to undertake a comprehensive analysis of their research endeavors, extracting valuable lessons to enhance criminology and security studies in sensitive areas. The extensive review of chapters revealed both commonalities and unique aspects among the research projects.

ABSTRACT The coronavirus pandemic has negatively affected people of all social strata, and continues to do so, but its effect has been the most severe on members of the most precarious populations. In this exploratory study conducted in Switzerland, the specific situation of homeless people, a particularly vulnerable population, is examined from a criminological perspective. In total, we surveyed 32 homeless individuals: 14 during the first wave of the pandemic (March-September 2020) and 18 during the second wave (December 2020-March 2021). Results corroborate that the pandemic has had adverse effects on the respondents – both socioeconomic and psychological. Most of the participants do not use drugs and, overall, those who reported drug use did not report an increase during the epidemic. The occurrence of both victimization and offending is low among the participants. Ethical and methodological considerations such as the minimization of social desirability bias, satisficing, as well as the recruitment of difficult-to-reach participants and data collection more broadly during a pandemic are discussed.

This paper explores antifa activists’ use of doxing on Twitter against individuals perceived as alt-right militants. Following the principles of Grounded Theory, we collected 4690 tweets published by antifa users between September 2019 and September 2020 and analysed a random subsample of 1638. Results show that antifa users perceive alt-right activists as a serious threat to their worldview and seek to neutralise their activism even at the cost of making them social pariahs. To achieve that goal, antifa activists collect personal data on persons they suspect of being alt-right activists to “build a case” and then disseminate that information through different virtual social networks to the largest audience possible. The aim of doxing is to encourage other social actors to react and take actions that could be detrimental to the individual targeted. The article discusses practical and ethical implications of this kind of political-based harassment and suggests that future research on doxing could focus on antifa blogs and websites, which include sensitive information forbidden on Twitter.

Many studies have analysed the violence to which sex workers (SWs) are exposed in countries where prostitution is criminalised, but violence in sex work when it is a legal and freelance activity has seldom been studied. This study is based on non-systematic participant observation and 14 interviews conducted with cisgender and transgender freelance SWs exercising their profession in Switzerland. Findings show that all the participants had been victims of work-related offences and that their victimisation can be interpreted through the updated version of Routine Activities Theory. Few reported the victimisation to the police although in general, they said that they appreciated the Swiss police. Most common perpetrators were customers, passers-by, and colleagues. The places where offences occurred can be defined as risky settings. The police, the SWs themselves and other actors such as social workers are identified as controllers, while the legal framework and NGOs themselves can be labelled as super-controllers. Our study suggests that public policies should not be limited simply to regulating prostitution, but also continuing to ensure SW’s safety by developing evidence-based prevention strategies.

Past research on violence against sex workers has contributed to our understanding of this phenomenon yet, often do not offer concrete preventative measures. The current study aims to investigate this issue through an environmental criminology perspective, and to identify measures that can be implemented to decrease violence through a situational crime prevention framework. Our sample consist of 402 French sex workers who experienced violent victimization (1990–2018). Latent class analysis revealed a four-class solution: (1) indoor/low-moderate guardianship, (2) outdoor/low guardianship, (3) mobile/low guardianship, and (4) mobile/moderate guardianship. Actionable crime prevention methods to mitigate the risk of violence suggested for each of the classes included pre-screening clients, installing panic buttons/closed-circuit television, offering self-defense and conflict management courses, and working in tandem.

Research addressing the perception of security of immigrants in Switzerland dates back to the 2000s. Using data from a victimisation survey conducted in Lugano, Switzerland (N = 7885), this study investigates the security perception of immigrant communities and its correlates. In contrast to previous findings, the analyses suggest that a higher percentage of immigrants perceive the city as highly safe than natives, this being more accentuated among extra-European immigrants and recently arrived migrants. At the neighbourhood level, results are less clear-cut. Collective efficacy, police proximity and the perceived ability of self-defence are the main predictors of high-security perceptions while having been a victim of violent crimes decreases the likelihood of perceiving both city and one's neighbourhood as safe. Despite positive results, the manuscript discusses the need for increasing the reliability and validity of the traditional measures used to question the fear of crime and the need for targeted interventions fostering cultural integration.

This article explores the routine precautions taken by sex workers (SW) in Switzerland, a country in which sex work is a legal activity. It is based on approximately 1100 h of non-systematic participant observation spread over 18 months and 14 semi-structured interviews with indoor and outdoor SW. The findings show that SW use a series of routine precautions that overlap with the situational prevention techniques for increasing perpetrators’ efforts or their perception of the risk of offending, reducing the rewards of the crime, and decreasing the provocations and perpetrators’ excuses. Future tests of the efficacy of these routine precautions could help developing specific situational crime prevention techniques for deterring offences against SW.

Criminologists have monitored the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on crime and criminal justice since the pandemic’s outbreak. Nonetheless, vulnerable and difficult-to-reach populations have been understudied thus far. This study sheds light on the experiences of sex workers (SW) during the first year of the coronavirus in Switzerland, a country where prostitution is legal. Based upon 40 questionnaires with SW outdoors and indoors and 50 h of field observation, SW reported that the pandemic has had adverse financial and psychosocial effects on them. During the first year of COVID-19, seventeen SW were victims of at least one work-related offence, the most prevalent of which were theft and fraud. Nevertheless, most SW did not report the incidents to the police. Comparing the non-victims with victims, we found that victims, particularly those of multiple crimes, are younger, more often foreigners from extra-EU countries, in an illegal situation and needed to work face to face during the prostitution ban during the lockdown in Switzerland. However, despite these circumstances, most SW do not use illegal drugs, and only a few of them used more during the pandemic. Our research findings were similar to those reported in former studies, although we could infer that the violent victimisation of our sample is less and none of the SW indicated violence on the part of the police. Nevertheless, we have no point of comparison with former years and thus propose a periodic crime victim survey of SW, as well as further prevention measures in the prostitution area.