To the editors of Psychology, Crime & Law:
Dr Theresa Gannon – Director of the Centre of Research and Education in Forensic Psychology (CORE-FP), Keynes College, University of Kent, UK
Professor Peter van Koppen – Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Professor Brian H. Bornstein – Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska, USA
Subject: request for paper retraction
Rijswijk, 8 January 2013
Dear editors,
In Psychology, Crime & Law, Volume 17, Issue 6, 2011 you published the paper
Veen, VC, Stevens, GWJM, Doreleijers, TA, & Vollebergh, WAM (2011). “Moroccan adolescent suspect offenders in the Netherlands: Ethnic differences in offender profiles”.
We request retraction of this paper because its discussion section contains a major falsehood. Moreover, this falsehood is supposed to be substantiated by 3 pages of statistical analyses, but these do not hold under scrutinization.
In the discussion section, the authors write that it is important to disclose to the public that criminal behaviour of young Moroccans is generally less severe than the criminal behaviour of indigenous young people:
Despite these limitations, the findings presented here point to the fact that Moroccan and native Dutch adolescents have highly distinctive offender profiles, showing that ethnic differences in the nature of crime cannot be ignored in research comparing the development of delinquent behaviour in ethnic minority and majority youths.
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