New Postdoc Researchers at NSCR

We have three new postdoc researchers at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR): Nieke Elbers, Lidewyde Berckmoes and Rutger Leukfeldt.
Nieke Elbers graduated in 2006 at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Maastricht. In 2013, she successfully defended her PhD thesis at the Faculty of Law at the VU University Amsterdam. Her thesis was about the negative effect of the personal injury compensation process on the recovery after a traffic crash. From 2014-2016, she was a postdoc researcher at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she conducted a study about procedural justice of compensation systems after a traffic - or work injury. She closely collaborated with policy makers, lawyers, and health care practitioners.
Since April 2016, Nieke is working at the NSCR, as a postdoc / project leader on Empirical Legal Studies (ELS). The ELS project aims to stimulate lawyers to conduct more empirical legal research. In general, lawyers are not trained in empiricism, and therefore not much empirical legal research is being conducted. This is a shortcoming. Often assumptions are made about how law is affecting human behaviour without testing whether these assumptions are true. Also, lawyers can struggle with judging empirical research, which can lead to wrong legal decisions. Empirical legal research is needed to prevent this. ELS is an important scientific innovation, which will provide answers to societal questions.
Lidewyde Berckmoes' primary interest is in intergenerational processes in contexts affected by war and violence from the perspective of children and youth. Currently, she works on a research project about the role of memory and anticipation in the context of violence and flight in Burundi. She is also developing new work on intergenerational processes among African migrants and refugees in the Netherlands and Belgium.
The projects build on her previous work as a postdoc and coordinator of research on the intergenerational transmission of violence and resilience in Burundi at UNICEF and the University of Amsterdam (2014-2016) and a postdoc project with transnational Nigerian migrant parents in the Netherlands at Maastricht University (2013-2014).  She holds a PhD (cum laude) in Social and Cultural Anthropology, obtained in February 2014 at the VU University in Amsterdam for her dissertation entitled .
Rutger Leukfeldt is a postdoc researcher at the NSCR and is involved in a project called ‘Cybercrime: the Human Factor’. This project aims to stimulate criminological research into cybercrime. At the moment, the majority of cybercrime research is carried out by researchers with a technical background. The ‘Cybercrime: the Human Factor’ project aims to map the current knowledge regarding, for example, individual offenders, cybercriminal networks, victims and legal issues. Furthermore, expert meetings with national and international experts will be organised to discuss future research directions. Finally, the project aims to develop a data repository of relevant cybercrime data.
From 2007 – 2016, Rutger was a researcher of the Cyber Safety Research Group of NHL University of Applied Sciences and Dutch Police Academy. Between 2007 – 2012, Rutger worked on a number of cybercrime studies for the Dutch government and private companies. Examples include studies into the modus operandi and characteristics of cybercriminals, a nation-wide cybercrime victim survey and a study into the organisation of Dutch law enforcement agencies responsible for the fight against cybercrime. From 2012 – 2016, Rutger carried out his PhD-study into cybercriminal networks. The goal of this study was to gain insight into the nature of these criminal networks and ultimately build a model for the police and banks in order to develop effective interventions.
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