Search

Like any Australians, older people are concerned about their safety. Australia's older population is growing rapidly, with one-quarter of the population projected to be over 65 years by the middle of the century. However, while it is a fact that older people are less at risk of criminal victimisation than other age groups, they tend to have a higher fear of crime than the general population.

Community crime prevention is a mixture of primary and secondary approaches. Typically a combination of developmental and situational crime prevention, it is intended to change the social conditions that are believed to sustain crime in communities. There are four closely related approaches to community crime prevention.

Summary report of the seminar is attached.

A national farm crime survey in 2003 found that 17 percent of farms experienced farm crime at least once in the previous 12 months (Anderson & McCall 2005). From the sample who replied, farm crime was estimated to cost the Australian economy at least $70 million annually. Highly accessible farms close to regional or urban centres were more likely to experience theft of farm machinery, vehicles or tools, or burglary, whereas very remote farms experienced the highest levels of livestock theft, illegal hunting and fishing, theft of materials, and illegal dumping of waste.

Foreword | Official Australian crime statistics indicate that individual offence levels peak around 15–24 years of age and decline thereafter (eg see AIC 2011). Change in this general age–crime trend could be expected to coincide with change in age-related demographic phenomena (South & Messner 2000). This paper is one of two by this author that investigate the impact of structural ageing on crime patterns.

Programs to prevent and reduce violence often adopt a public health approach to crime prevention. Such an approach does not replace criminal justice or other crime prevention approaches. Rather, it complements them by bringing a different view and other important players, tools and resources to the task of preventing and reducing crime.

The contemporary approach to the delivery of community crime prevention work is quite a sophisticated activity when viewed from the perspective of modern management practices. Typically, crime prevention programs are built on the idea of collaborative multi-agency action involving a number of different initiatives and participants. They use varying interventions that are implemented simultaneously or at least in a loosely ordered sequence. As a result, crime prevention programs will frequently operate through partnership arrangements directed at achieving shared outcomes.

Foreword | Recent research shows that not all assaults described in victimisation surveys are considered to be crimes by the victims. This paper investigates this issue and puts forward findings which have implications for the role surveys play in measuring crime. Using ABS 2005 Personal Safety Survey data, it examines the extent to which surveyed incidents of assault are perceived by victims to be criminal events, aspects of incidents that predict perceptions and any existing variations by sex.

The term "restorative justice" is often used to describe many different practices that occur at various stages of the criminal justice system including:

Acknowledgements

This handbook was commissioned by the New South Wales Department of Attorney General and Justice and prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Joanne Baker and Emma Worthington from the New South Wales Department of Attorney General and Justice for their valuable input and feedback.

© Crown in right of the State of New South Wales (Department of Attorney General and Justice)

Developmental and early intervention strategies for the reduction and prevention of crime can operate across all three levels of prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary.

Developmental prevention is intervention early in developmental pathways that may lead to the emergence and recurrence of criminal behaviours and other social problems. It does not just mean early in life, although inevitably many of the critical moments for effective intervention will occur during the early years.

What people want to know about a crime prevention initiative is 'did it work?' That is, did it achieve its intended outcome by preventing or reducing the targeted crime and if so, by how much?

Confiscating the assets of criminals is one of the legal responses included in the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF-GAFI) recommendations to the international community for combating money laundering and financing of terrorism.