Introduction

Experiences of sexual harassment are common among university students. At the same time, research shows that victims and bystanders find it difficult to determine when an incident meets the criteria for sexual harassment. The aim of this study therefore was to obtain a richer and deeper understanding of the obstacles that university students encounter in identifying sexual harassment in the academic environment.

Methods

Individual interviews and focus groups were conducted with a total of 85 students at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral level in five European countries (Belgium, Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden) between 2020 and 2022. Thematic analysis was used to identify obstacles in identifying sexual harassment.

Results

The obstacles described by participants were found to fall into three main categories: (1) preconceived notions about what constitutes sexual harassment that did not necessarily concur with lived experiences, (2) navigating an often blurred or ambiguous line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and (3) the existence of competing interpretations of what had happened.

Conclusions

The results point to a gap between the participants’ lived experiences and their interpretations of them, which include difficulties positioning their experiences within their theoretical understanding of sexual harassment.

Policy Implications

Measures to counteract the obstacles faced by victims and bystanders in identifying sexual harassment in academia should target this cognitive gap, for instance by addressing the stereotypes that characterize preconceived notions about sexual harassment.

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Twenty years ago, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention presented a report that highlighted serious problems with regard to identifying, investigating, and sentencing offenders for hate crimes. The same problems have also been described in international research from several other countries. Since then, several measures have been taken to remedy these problems, but it remains unknown whether these measures have been successful. The aim of the present study is therefore to trace developments over time, using Sweden as a case study, and to evaluate the extent to which the problems identified earlier have been remedied. The results show that the problems identified by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention still remain despite a continuous process of reform. Theoretical links and parallels to international research are discussed throughout the article.

A randomised controlled trial was developed and implemented together with police officers working to combat drugcrime at an open drug scene in Stockholm. The aim was to evaluate a method called motivational talks, which areheld by police officers to encourage drug crime suspects to seek help. Relapse into drug crime was compared betweenthe control group and the experimental group to determine whether the treatment, i.e., the motivational talk, had aneffect. The study shows that motivational talks had a small but non-significant impact on relapse into drug crime afternine months, but the effect had disappeared at the second follow-up. Motivational talks might still have other effectson the individual or the police. Studying the use of repeated treatment might be a way of furthering the research onthe effect of motivational talks.

The well-being of neighbourhoods in terms of socioeconomic conditions constitutes an important element in analyses focused on the explanation of crime trends and public safety. Recent developments in Sweden concerning gun violence and open drug scenes are worrying and the police are under a great deal of pressure to resolve the situation in many neighbourhoods, which is in turn affecting Swedish society as a whole. This study focuses on micro areas in terms of sociodemographic factors and the presence of drug markets and gun violence. The aim is to explore the relationship between these factors and what characterises areas that are experiencing the greatest difficulties. The study develops an index for the prediction of gun violence in micro areas, in this study portrayed by vector grids. The findings show an overlap between gun violence and drug markets and that micro areas in that overlap share harsh sociodemographic conditions. The study produces an index indicating the probability that a grid cell would experience gun violence. The index was then validated using recent gun incidents, and was found to have high accuracy. The resulting grids constitute a suitable target for resource allocation by police and other actors. This could facilitate a more accurate and precise focus for measures to prevent areas from becoming—or to disrupt already existing—hot spots for gun violence.

The current article reports findings from a research project on partnership policing in Stockholm, Sweden, to investigate how partnership policing strategies translate into social action. Consideration is given to the ways in which police officers and city employees produce chains of administrative tasks as they navigate their institutional environment and strive to produce legitimacy for partnership policing. More broadly, the findings suggest that the inner mechanisms of a partnership approach to policing are shaped by the self-referential (Eigendynamik) character of administration. The article discusses implications for partnership policing and for the broader literature on policing.

There is a surge in gun violence in Sweden. Prior research has shown how these expressions of violence tend to be concentrated in space. For instance, there is an increased risk of a shooting occurring in close proximity to a prior shooting in the three largest cities in Sweden, especially at open drug scenes (ODS) in socially disadvantaged areas. Furthermore, prior research has found a clear spatial connection between shootings and the presence of ODS in Stockholm. However, less is known about the patterns of gun seizures. How does spatial patterns of gun seizures overlap with shootings and the presence of ODS and how can these be used to advance police practice? Such questions are important to add nuance to the overarching view on “gun violence”. The present study aims to explore the questions by converging three types of data drawn from the Stockholm region: one on gun seizures, one on gun incidents and another on the presence of ODS. With the use of spatial data analyses, we learn whether there are systematic differences in the patterns of gun seizures, gun incidents and the presence of ODS. The importance of nuanced data and how the results can be used by the police in their strategic work is discussed. The results may advance both police activities towards gang criminality and future research on gun violence.

In this chapter, we discuss how cultural expertise can be used to neutralize stereotyped images of minority cultures in court in female genital mutilation/cutting–related cases because, wisely employed, it may counteract possible negative effects of typification and judicial stereotyping.

The inclusion of gender in hate crime legislation has been the subject of scholarly debatesince the 1990s, but only a handful of empirical studies have focused on victims’ experiences of gender-bias hate crime. Therefore, misogynistic hate crimes are primarily discussed as a theoretical or legal category of events. In this study, the aim is instead to shedlight on how female victims defne, describe, and are afected by their experiences ofgender-bias hate crime. In doing so, the study contributes insights into misogynistic hatecrimes as lived experiences, rather than as an abstract legal or theoretical concept.

Research and official statistics alike identify women from racial minoritiesas a high-risk group for racial hate crime. Still, the construction of womenin racial hate crime remains largely unstudied and the current knowledgeon racial hate crime against women can at best be described as fragmentary. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to explore the constructions ofrace and gender from the perspective of female victims of racial hatecrime. The study draws on intersectional theory and consists ofa discourse analysis based on nine interviews with women who havebeen targets of racial hate crime. The results show that the constructionof race in hate crimes targeting women differs distinctively from theconstruction of race in hate crimes targeting men. The female victims ofracial hate crime often find themselves entangled in racial power struggles between men: a power struggle in which men may show their statusvis-á-vis out-group men by sexually controlling or abusing women.Thereby, women’s bodies are used as a tool in racial status conflictsbetween groups of men, as identities, scripts, and stereotypes foundprimarily within conservatism and right-wing ideology are enacted onthe bodies of the victims.