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What is domestic violence?

A new report has revealed that for the 2024-2025 financial year, the Australian Federal Police received 371 reports of alleged modern slavery. 

Modern slavery is when someone is forced to work, marry or do other things through coercion (like manipulation, control or violence), threats or lies. 

These are the latest figures from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) report Modern slavery in Australia 2024-25.

The Criminology Research Grants (CRG) program is a procurement exercise administered by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), taking into account the advice of the Criminology Research Advisory Council. Funding for the program comes from Commonwealth, state and territory governments and is administered in line with Commonwealth Procurement Rules.

The objectives of the CRG program are to support research relevant to current and future public policy issues, to foster quality criminological research and to ensure that funded research is disseminated effectively.

Foreword | Investigations into the widespread possession of online child sexual abuse images reveal enormous variety in the types of images collected by adults with a sexual interest in children. While there is almost universal condemnation of the sexual exploitation of children through such images, it is not possible to define precisely what constitutes an illegal child sexual abuse image. This is because the concept is broad, changeable and, at the margins, elusive.

In 2024–25, 33 of the 113 deaths in custody were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the largest number of Indigenous deaths in custody since 1979–80.

Contributors

• Ms Judi Fortuin
  Coordinator, National AIDS in Prisons Information Clearing House
• Mr Peter Byrnes
  Manager, Occupational Health and Safety, Department of Corrective Services, New South Wales
• Professor Duncan Chappell
  Director, Australian Institute of Criminology
• Dr Matt Gaughwin
  Visiting Fellow, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University
• Mr Alan Grimsley
  Manager, Professional Education, Centre for Education and Information on Drugs and Alcohol, New South Wales

There has been little information in the public domain to date about sentences handed down for arson. The Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council recently released data on 276 adults sentenced for the crime of arson between 2001-02 and 2005-06 in the County and Supreme Courts, showing that more than 99 percent of such cases were heard in these courts. While there is no indication whether the arsons involved bushfires, the data do provide information on the number of convicted arsonists who received a custodial sentence.

Sentencing outcomes, adults, Victoria [see attached PDF]

The following new titles have been added to the growing collection of arson-related literature that can be found in the searchable bibliographic database. In addition to these titles, the database provides access to major bushfire arson news articles.

Foreword | Across the spectrum of operational policing activities, one situation that poses a degree of risk to community safety is when an alleged offender chooses to flee in a vehicle. In the worst case, the offender, police members or other bystanders may be injured or killed. Every motor vehicle pursuit that ends in a death is a tragedy and one that impacts not only on the families and friends of the deceased, but also on the police members involved in the incident.

Foreword | Once a trafficked person has exited an exploitative situation, they may require support to return and reintegrate into their chosen community. Using data contained in the International Organization for Migration Counter Trafficking Module, the recovery, return and reintegration experiences of Indonesian victims of human trafficking are examined in this paper. Understanding these experiences has important benefits in developing a better understanding of what assists returnees to recover and may decrease the likelihood of re-trafficking.

In 2003 the Australian Institute of Criminology randomly surveyed 1,078 small businesses across Australia in five business types (florists, computer retailers, booksellers, recorded music retailers and toy and game retailers) to identify the proportion of these businesses trading online, the extent to which online traders had experienced online credit card fraud in 2001 and 2002, and the losses associated with such fraud. Overall, 32 per cent of businesses had been the victim of online credit card fraud, with 51 per cent of traders experiencing more than one incident over the two years.

It has been argued that bed wetting (enuresis), firesetting and cruelty to animals are predictive of violence in later life. The three behaviours are commonly referred to as the MacDonald triad. Evidence for the triad's predictive power is not robust however, with most support drawn from limited clinical samples. An early study by Hellman and Blackman (1966) found support for the association, with 23 of 31 aggressive patients in a psychiatric treatment centre having a history of all three components (compared with seven of the 53 non-aggressive patients).

Based on similarities in traits, behaviours and attributes, the FBI (Douglas et al. 1992) and National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (Sapp et al. n.d.) have developed offender profiles for specific arson motives. No single offender is likely to display all of these characteristics, but it is likely that many of the attributes, traits and behaviours listed below will be present within bushfire arsonists lighting fires on the basis of these motives.

Erratum

2008. Serial murder in Australia. Crime facts info no. 163. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology.

The table titled Typology of serial murder in Australia, 1989–90 to 2005–06 contains an error in the third row under Number and gender of victims. The information given is 1 male; 6 females. This should read 2 males; 5 females. We apologise for this error.

Foreword | The National Deaths in Custody Program contains a dataset spanning 25 years with details of every death occurring in prison custody, police custody and custody-related operations, and in juvenile detention facilities across Australia. This report summarises the trends in these deaths between 1990 and 2004. Compared with the period 1980-1989 in which the majority of deaths in custody occurred in police custody, prison custody deaths have accounted for the overall majority of deaths since 1990.