New ECOH interview: Jan van Dijk

Jan van Dijk has long been a leading figure in European criminology. Currently affiliated to both the Tilburg University and the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NCSR), he previously held senior positions both inside (Leiden University) and outside academia (Dutch Ministry of Justice; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime; Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, Council of Europe). His pivotal contributions in various subfields, such as victimology, victimisation and safety surveys, and crime statistics have been widely acknowledged. In fact, Jan van Dijk is the recipient of the ESC European Criminology Award, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and the Sellin-Glueck Award of the American Society of Criminology.

In this ECOH interview conducted by NCSR’s Catrien Bijleveld, van Dijk revisits his decades-long career, reflecting on how criminology looked like in the Netherlands back in the 1970s and 1980s, when criminology degrees and criminology departments had been created only in a handful of European countries. In his conversation with Bijleveld, the Dutch criminologist examines the gradual emergence of victimology as a distinct area within crime and justice studies across Europe. He also comments on the development of victimisation surveys in many jurisdictions since the last decades of the twentieth century, and specifically on the International Crime Victims Survey, in whose creation and consolidation van Dijk played a vital role. Relying on those ways of measuring crime, he challenges the thesis of the crime drop, thereby nuancing conventional knowledge on recent crime changes. In addition, drawing on this long and successful career, Jan van Dijk offers insightful reflections on the current challenges of European criminology.