South African Crime Quarterly 27

Individual articles are hosted on the Academy of Science of South Africa's Open Access Journals system. To access individual articles for this edition, click here

This edition of SACQ will hit the streets less than a month before April 22, the day on which South Africans go to the polls to vote in a new government.

The articles in this edition of SACQ reflect the continued search by researchers and practitioners to understand the high rate of violent crime in South Africa. Vanessa Barolsky and Suren Pillay argue that the high level of violent crime in South Africa has led to a ‘radical problem of understanding’ that can only be overcome by considering South Africa’s violent crime problem in an international context. Louise Ehlers and Sean Tait write about the Open Society Foundation’s efforts to implement a programme that is informed by the view that crime can only be managed by long-term systemic social change.

Reflecting the concern that South Africans have about high levels of public service corruption, Werner Webb and Andrew Faull provide views on how corruption should be stemmed in the criminal justice system, and finally, as an antidote to these issues that command a great deal of public attention, Irma Labuschagne asks readers to question the validity of profiling as a tool to catch serial killers and asks difficult questions about how we define serial killers.