Police posing as juveniles online to catch sex offenders: Is it working?

Abstract This paper explores the extent and effectiveness of proactive investigations in which investigators pose as minors on the Internet to catch potential sex offenders. It utilizes a subsample of cases from the National Juvenile Online Victimization Survey, which concerned persons arrested for Internet sex crimes against minors in the year beginning July 1, 2000. Results suggest proactive investigations represented a significant proportion (25%) of all arrests for Internet sex crimes against minors. Such investigations were being conducted at all levels of law enforcement. The online personas assumed by investigators paralleled the ages and genders of real youth victimized in sex crimes that started as online encounters. These proactive investigations accessed an offender group that appeared somewhat less deviant in terms of adult sexual behavior and arrest history but equally deviant as other online offenders in terms of possession of child pornography. Prosecution of these cases produced high rates of guilty pleas and low rates of dismissed or dropped cases. The entrapment, fantasy or role-playing, and factual impossibility defenses were used but not successfully. Findings suggest that the Internet sometimes allows law enforcement to interdict before a youth is victimized, gather solid evidence of offenses, and find and track some offenders

Nebkha dunes in the Molopo Basin, South Africa and Botswana: formation controls and their validity as indicators of soil degradation

Nebkha dunes have been proposed as a reliable rapid indicator of aeolian erosion and dryland degradation. This paper tests the applicability of these links for the Molopo Basin, southern Africa where it is shown that nebkha sediments are largely locally derived from interdune areas and are significantly enriched in available inorganic nutrients. Feedbacks with the bush canopy are the most likely cause of the enrichment, such that this can occur without associated declines in nutrient availability in surrounding source areas. Thus, although the nebkhas indicate aeolian transport of sediment, the immediate association with soil degradation is over-simplistic

125 years of the Geographical Association

This article provides an overview of our disciplinary history on the occasion of the Geographical Association's 125-year anniversary. It accepts that a definitive and comprehensive disciplinary history cannot be written, covering human and physical geography, conceptual and methodological developments, key figures and significant moments, also paying adequate attention to the changing intellectual environment and wider social context. Instead, the article is loosely chronological in structure, noting continuities and discontinuities between past and present, and raising questions about the kind of history we need in order to reflect critically on the past and to inform the Association's future trajectory