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The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) releases a first-time report on cybercrime in Australia.

Foreword | Although the number of identified cases of trafficking into Australia is relatively low, the hidden nature of this crime and reluctance of trafficked persons to report to authorities suggests that a number of cases may go unidentified and the problem may be more extensive than available data indicates. Much can be learned about the risks of exploitation, including trafficking, from an overview of undocumented movement throughout the region.

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]

Foreword | Online communities are increasingly being recognised as a way of sharing ideas and knowledge among different practitioner communities, particularly when practitioners are not able to meet face to face. This paper explores the considerations associated with establishing online communities for crime prevention practitioners, drawing on research from across the community of practice, online community and knowledge management sectors.

Foreword | The volume of digital forensic evidence is rapidly increasing, leading to large backlogs. In this paper, a Digital Forensic Data Reduction and Data Mining Framework is proposed. Initial research with sample data from South Australia Police Electronic Crime Section and Digital Corpora Forensic Images using the proposed framework resulted in significant reduction in the storage requirements—the reduced subset is only 0.196 percent and 0.75 percent respectively of the original data volume.

Foreword | The disadvantages faced by Indigenous Australians are well-documented and are the focus of determined efforts by government and non-government agencies throughout Australia. Indigenous justice and safety are priority issues for the Council of Australian Governments and law enforcement. The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has contributed to work on closing the gap of Indigenous disadvantage by increasing knowledge about justice and community safety issues affecting Indigenous people.

The ultimate goal of crime prevention is to develop a highly reliable method for forecasting future crime trends and problems. If we can predict crime, we can develop prevention and reduction measures. But like reliably forecasting the weather, there are many errors in our methods and gaps in our skills. It is therefore not surprising that important developments can be very influential.

The South Australian Home Detention Program today received a bronze award in the community-led category of the 2023 Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Awards (ACVPAs).

The ACVPAs recognise best practice in the prevention or reduction of violence and other types of crime in Australia and play a vital role in highlighting effective community-based initiatives to prevent crime and violence before it occurs.

Measures to reduce residential burglary are always a major feature of crime prevention programs across the world. One of the most important of these programs was the Reducing burglary initiative (RBI), which was part of Britain's innovative Crime reduction programme (CRP). The RBI was designed to reduce the incidence of burglary nationally in England and Wales through targeting local action to those areas with the highest burglary rates.

The British Reducing Burglary Initiative (RBI) was evaluated several times in its four year life. CRM No.31 presented the findings of one of these reviews (Kodz & Pease 2003). In a separate study of the RBI, Hope et al. (2004) used a time-series methodology to examine what proportion of the reduction in burglary was directly attributable to the RBI initiative, isolated from all other factors. This supplementary research found that while burglary rates generally declined, this could be attributed to the independent effect of the RBI in only six of the 20 targeted areas.

The term 'capital punishment' is derived from the Latin caput, meaning 'head'. It originally referred to death by decapitation, but now applies generally to state sanctioned executions. Some Middle East countries still practise decapitation for certain offences, but more common forms of the death penalty include electrocution, gas, firing squad, lethal injection and hanging.¹

The idea of deterrence is one of the oldest and most basic concepts of crime prevention. Put simply, the idea of deterrence is that if you do something wrong and are caught, then the subsequent punishment will deter you from doing that wrong again. The fear of future punishment therefore discourages or deters transgressing of social norms expressed through the law.

Bushfire arson is problematic across all states and territories of Australia. While the vast majority of deliberately lit fires are typically small, the cumulative impact on the community and environment is significant: adversely affecting the quality of lives of people within close proximity; potentially endangering property via ember attacks; wasting valuable firefighting resources; and drastically impacting on the health and biodiversity of remnant vegetation in or near urban areas which have not evolved to cope with the frequency of fires to which they are subjected.

This report is one of three in a suite on this issue by the AIC which also includes Alternative remittance systems in Australia: Perceptions of users and providers and Risks of money laundering and the financing of terrorism arising from alternative remittance systems.