In a special issue in Ethnography, the question was raised how to study violence ethnographically in Latin America and the Caribbean. The present article seeks to extend this special issue with reflections on how to study different forms of violence ‘after the fact’, based on fieldwork at a juvenile detention centre in Curaçao in 2019 and 2020. We present intersubjectively realistic accounts of violence in the family sphere. These accounts came into being by means of two acts of empirical triangulation: (1) looking at violent episodes through the eyes of different people involved and (2) contrasting the counterstories that emerged from this with the detention centre’s case files that construct particular images of the detained youth and their family members. We end the article with critical reflections on our own unwitting contribution to the production of silence, which frustrated the youth’s counterstories.

This article examines who volunteers for humanitarian organizations as compared to volunteering for other organizations versus people not volunteering, in the Netherlands. Using high-quality survey data ( N = 5,050), we depart from a classic theoretical resource-based approach to study what forms of resources play a role in the likelihood to volunteer for different types of civic associations. We find that education and subjective health as indicators of human capital matter in volunteering for most types of associations, however, more so for humanitarian organizations than some other types of organizations. Social capital is of larger importance in volunteering for leisure organizations than for humanitarian ones, while cultural capital is relevant for volunteering but not more for humanitarian associations. Some forms of capital are thus stronger related to particular organizations, showing the different demographic compositions of the distinguished associations. We recommend to be more sensitive in distinguishing explanations of volunteering for different associations.

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This article addresses what motivations volunteers have for volunteering for refugees and whether these motivations differ from or complement motivations to volunteer in general, such as included in the widely used measurement instrument, the Volunteer Function Inventory (VFI). We organized eight focus groups with volunteers for refugees (N = 44) and interviewed five involved coordinators, all working in one city in the Netherlands. Results show that humanitarian concerns and social justice were highly relevant for people’s motivations, next to volunteering to obtain or improve knowledge and skills. We find support for the earlier suggested extension of the VFI with the social justice motivation. Next, the current study expands existing analysis on volunteer motivations by identifying four areas that require further attention: (1) volunteers for refugees seek a meaningful role in life; (2) are motivated by the pragmatism of this volunteer work; (3) have emotional reasons; and (4) are motivated by media exposure.