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Proceedings of a conference held 6-8 May 1991

Contents

• The sex industry in the Australian Capital Territory: a law reformer's perspective
  Bernard Collaery

Clarification of issues

• Feminist approaches to the sex industry
  Barbara Sullivan
• Why should we oppose the 'sexploitation' industry?
  Reverend Fred Nile
• Legal perspectives in clarifying the issues of the sex industry
  Carolyn Pickles

Overseas sex industry perspectives

• Pornography, sex crime, and public policy

The Australian Institute of Criminology's Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program operates across Australia surveying police detainees on their drug use and criminal behaviour. In the first quarter of 2003 and the third quarter of 2005 a total of 1,597 detainees (1,355 males and 242 females) in seven sites provided details of partner violence experienced and perpetrated over their lifetimes. A partner was defined as someone with whom the detainee had an intimate relationship, whether they lived with the person or not.

The Australian Government Attorney-General's Department funded the Australian Institute of Criminology to undertake the Drug Use Careers of Offenders study. The first two parts of the study looked at men and women in prison. The third part comprised research into the lifetime offending and substance use patterns of 371 juveniles, aged 10 to 17 years, incarcerated in Australian juvenile detention centres. The study confirmed that young people sentenced to detention have extensive offending and drug use histories.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), through its membership of the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce (ACFT) and its SCAMwatch website, monitors scams and informs consumers and small business about how to recognise, avoid and report them. In March 2006, as part of a pilot study, 85 percent of callers (n=103) to the ACCC's national hotline agreed to complete a questionnaire concerning their experiences of consumer scams over the 12 months from March 2005. Callers were asked whether they had received an unsolicited scam and what method was used to contact them.

The Australian Institute of Criminology's National Firearms Theft Monitoring Program was established in 2006 to examine all incidents of firearms theft reported to police. In the program's first annual report, for 2004-05, almost 1,500 firearms, or less than 0.1 of one percent of all registered firearms, were reported as stolen in 668 incidents (Borzycki & Mouzos 2007). This represents a downward trend since earlier research (Mouzos 2002). The figure below shows the majority of rifles (80%), shotguns (82%) and handguns (60%) were stolen from private residential premises.

The most recent statistics on motor vehicle theft indicate there were 139,943 motor vehicles stolen in 2001 - a one per cent increase on the number recorded stolen in 2000. In cases where the place of motor vehicle theft was specified, 61 per cent occurred in community locations, namely streets/footpaths (42 per cent), car parks (11 per cent) and other community locations (eight per cent).

A recent study by the Australian Institute of Criminology has analysed trends in bank robbery based on information from the Armed Attacks Database compiled by the Australian Bankers' Association, and data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Of the 808 bank robbery incidents between January 1998 and May 2002 in which the number of offenders involved in the hold-up was recorded, more than half (55 per cent) were committed by lone offenders, about 25 per cent by pairs, and around 20 per cent by three or more robbers (that is, gangs).