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Foreword | Children's 'witnessing' or exposure to domestic violence has been increasingly recognised as a form of child abuse, both in Australia and internationally. Although it is difficult to accurately assess the scope of the problem, research has demonstrated that a substantial amount of domestic violence is witnessed by children. As this paper outlines, witnessing domestic violence can involve a range of incidents, ranging from the child 'only' hearing the violence, to the child being forced to participate in the violence or being used as part of a violent incident.

Foreword | The Australian Institute of Criminology was funded by the Australian Crime Commission to undertake research that could inform and complement the work of the National Indigenous Violence and Child Abuse Intelligence Task Force. It was important, given the plethora of government inquiries and initiatives in recent times, to initially review and assess the evidence of victimisation of, and offending by, Indigenous people. The first summary of this evidence on risk factors associated with Indigenous victimisation was released last year.

On the 14 November 1994, the Senate agreed to a motion by Senator Harradine requiring all Australian Government departments and agencies produce an indexed list of files every six months for tabling before parliament. The production of the list is intended to make the operations of government more transparent to the Australian public.

While revenge is a common motive in urban-structural arson, there is not the same specific target in bushfire arson. The focus of the offender's anger is more likely to be displaced from a specific person or institution towards society as a whole, or perhaps a particular community or group within it. For instance, a firesetter may start a fire as a way of attacking the policies or practices of a government land management agency. The following table includes a series of characteristics that were commonly observed by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC; Sapp et al.

Australia has entered the digital age. The convergence of computing and communications is already changing the way we live. Health, education, banking, indeed every institution in society, is undergoing profound change as the result of new technologies. This is no less the case with gambling.

In recent years, electronic-based transactions have increased considerably in countries such as Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. This is not surprising due to the reduced cost and increased speed of internet-based transactions in comparison with bricks-and-mortar-based transactions.

Electronic payment systems

Electronic payment systems can be broadly categorised as follows:

Contents

• The television program standards
• Community attitudes to violence on television
• What needs to be done
• Conclusion
• References

Foreword | This paper investigates self-reported prevalence, patterns and potential harms of benzodiazepine use in a sample of adult police detainees, using data from the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program for the period 1999 to 2005. Of the sample, 15% had used illegal benzodiazepines in the previous 12 months, and around 13% had used prescribed benzodiazepines in the previous fortnight. The extent of self-reported benzodiazepine dependence was much lower than that for heroin, and similar to that for amphetamines.

Natural bushfires are governed by the forces of nature: although lightning strikes potentially at any time of the day, most natural fires occur from midday to 6 pm, coincident with the hot conditions conducive to thunderstorm activity. In contrast the timing of human-caused bushfires largely reflects the activities and movements of people within their local environment, be that the day-to-day activities of work, school, shopping etc, or personal and social activities that take place after hours.

Foreword | There is significant interest in the issue of child sexual abuse committed in institutional settings. This study uses information collected from a sample of 23 convicted Canadian sex offenders to examine key elements of the offending. Issues explored include the nature of the offender’s involvement with institutions, their own prior sexual victimisation experiences, factors influencing the selection of victims and the locations where the sexual assaults occurred.

Foreword | Controversies over how the law should regulate the presentation of expert testimony on DNA forensic science were explored in an experimental study comparing traditional verbal with audiovisual modes of delivery. Pre-trial DNA knowledge, as assessed in 3,611 jury-eligible Australians, was limited. From this group, 470 citizens watched a simulated homicide trial containing a cognitively-sequenced generic tutorial on DNA profiling evidence. The expert tutorial significantly improved DNA knowledge, irrespective of the mode of presentation.

In Australia, three defendants in two cases have been charged and prosecuted for 'slavery' or 'trafficking in persons' under the Criminal Code (Cth), in circumstances where the crimes have allegedly occurred in contexts other than the sex industry. These cases tend to be described as instances of 'labour trafficking', even though the parameters of this phrase are far from settled (see further AIC 2009). This brief describes the progression of these two cases through the Australian court system, with varying outcomes.

Foreword | Sexual assault has among the highest rates of acquittal and lowest rates of proven guilt compared with other offences. Given that more than 70 percent of sexual assault incidents are not reported to police and only about one in 10 reported incidents results in a guilty finding, increasing conviction rates for sexual assault is a key issue for the criminal justice system. This paper presents findings from two recent studies conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology.

In Australia and overseas there exists a paucity of research on deaths in custody where women are the primary focus of study; most of the literature in this area treats women as a subset of the primary focus - men. It has been suggested that this lack of information about women dying in custody is due to the relatively small number of female deaths when compared with the number of male deaths. Indeed, Scraton and Chadwick (1995, p. 89) comment that: