Intimate Femicide: The Role of Coercive Control

Severe and escalating violence is cited as a precursor to intimate partner homicide and figures prominently in risk assessments and domestic violence death reviews. Drawing on interviews from the Australian Homicide Project with a sample of men convicted of killing intimate partners, we examine the backgrounds of perpetrators and the contexts in which the killings occurred and find that fully half report no physical or sexual assaults against their partners in the year prior to the homicide. These results raise important questions about assessments of risk and the typification of the “battered woman” on which many policy responses rely

Project MARGIN: Conceptual report: defining the indicators defining demographic, socioeconomic and socio-geographic determinants of insecurity

In Deliverable 2.1 of the MARGIN project, a database was collated to enable a comparative analysis between police recorded crime data and crime victimisation surveys across five European countries. In the present report, we present such an analysis in order to identify a range of demographic, socioeconomic, and socio-geographic determinants of insecurity. The available data enable two dimensions of insecurity to be addressed. The first, victimisation, can be measured through two sources: police recorded crime data and responses to questions regarding victimisation in a crime victimisation survey. This dimension of insecurity is known in the MARGIN project as the objective dimension as it attempts to capture individuals’ actual experiences with crime. The second, perceived insecurity, relates to questions in the crime victimisation survey surrounding respondents’ thoughts about crime, safety, and how their perceptions about crime alter their habits. This aspect is known as the subjective dimension. It has been shown previously that, although related, perceived insecurity and victimisation capture different aspects of insecurity. Moreover, there are some instances where people who have a very small risk of experiencing victimisation in fact have very high levels of perceived insecurity (see Doran and Burgess (2012) for a review). In this report, we analyse consistencies in the MARGIN database with respect to a range of indicators of insecurity. It is important to determine indicators of insecurity in order to identify marginalised communities who tend to experience a disproportionate amount of victimisation and who also have high levels of perceived insecurity and fear of crime. Identification of such communities can enable directed policies to reduce levels of insecurity. The results of this analysis are intended to inform the development of the MARGIN victimisation survey being developed in Work Package 4. In what follows, we first conceptualise the objective dimension by examining victimisation rates across the different study areas, as obtained from both police recorded crime and victimisation survey data. Next, we consider the subjective dimension by considering questions relating to different aspects of perceived insecurity. After describing a number of problems that arise when attempting to directly compare questions across the different victimisation surveys, we turn to the identification of a range of demographic and socioeconomic indicators which we find to be associated with particular aspects of perceived insecurity. We present the results of a range of regression analyses performed with this data. Finally, we discuss a range of potential sociogeographic indicators of insecurity, focusing particularly on the example of street robbery in Barcelona. We also discuss a range of other points to be considered in the identification of marginalised communities

Project MARGIN: Factors affecting insecurity

The research undertaken in Work Package 3 has identified a number of indicators of insecurity following the analysis of victimisation surveys and police recorded crime data from each study region of the MARGIN project. From this analysis, it is clear that insecurity is a multi-faceted concept, with different factors acting at the individual, neighbourhood and even country levels. Despite this complexity, the analysis has identified several robust correlates of insecurity that should be focused on in the subsequent research of the MARGIN project. In this report, we discuss these factors with the intention of guiding future research. Work package 3 was designed to undertake analysis of the MARGIN database. Resulting from this analysis, a taxonomy to enable the selection of two neighbourhoods in each of the five cities of the MARGIN project—in which future research will be conducted—was defined. More detailed descriptions of these findings can be found in Deliverables 3.1 – 3.3. In this report, we give an overview of our findings and comment on how they largely conform to concepts and trends found in the existing research literature (which overwhelmingly focusses on trends within rather than between countries). We also discuss the limitations of our findings. Many of these limitations are familiar problems associated with cross-national comparisons of administrative surveys with little consistency in survey design. A further factor limiting any survey based research is that there will inevitably be questions that could have been asked but were not. In the final part of this report, we consider whether there are any areas of enquiry that could usefully be included in the MARGIN survey, which would help us to further understand the emergence of insecurity within marginalised communities

Criminal Careers Among Female Perpetrators of Family and Non-family Homicide in Australia

Knowledge of women’s pathways to serious offending, including homicide, is limited. This study contributes to a small but growing body of literature examining the criminal careers of serious female offenders by using interview data with females convicted of murder or manslaughter in Australia to examine various dimensions of their criminal careers, specifically, prevalence, frequency, age of onset, duration, and offending variety. In particular, in this study we compared criminal career dimensions across women who had killed a family member (e.g., intimate partner, children) and those whose victims were not part of the family unit (i.e., acquaintances or strangers). Our findings reveal differences between female homicide offenders who kill within and outside of the family unit. Although both groups had comparable overall lifetime prevalence of self-reported participation in criminal offending, findings indicate that participation among the family group was typically at low levels of frequency, of limited duration, and with relatively little variety in categories of offending. The family group also reported lower contact with the criminal justice system compared with the nonfamily group, and were less likely to have experienced some form of criminal/legal sanction in the 12 months prior to the homicide incident. This suggests that women who kill family members are more “conventional” than their nonfamily counterparts, in terms of having low and time-limited (i.e., short duration) lifetime participation in criminal offending

Child sexual abuse material in child-centred institutions: situational crime prevention approaches

This paper focuses on the potential for child-centred institutions to use situational crime prevention (SCP) strategies to prevent or reduce child sexual abuse material (CSAM)1 offending as a distinct form of child sexual abuse (CSA). We discuss the failure of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia to address the potential for CSAM offending to occur in child-centred institutions. Our premise is that CSAM offending is markedly shaped by the situation in which it occurs, rather than by any pre-existing preparedness to offend sexually against children. In this context, SCP for CSAM offending must be considered as part of overall strategies to combat CSA in institutional settings. However, we acknowledge that effective implementation of SCP in this area is not straightforward. We consider some of the challenges in implementing SCP at an institutional level

Understanding and Managing the Occupational Health Impacts on Investigators of Internet Child Exploitation

An empirical research project was carried out involving Internet child exploitation (ICE) investigators from all nine Australian police jurisdictions. The aim of the research was to examine the physical, social and psychological impacts of ICE investigation in order to inform the development of prevention and best practice guidelines. The research comprised two studies. The first study involved an online survey of 188 current, former and incoming ICE investigators and a comparison sample of 106 non-ICE police. The survey comprised a wide-ranging set of existing scales and items written specifically for this study. The second study involved a sub-sample of 32 current and former ICE investigators who agreed to take part in a semi-structured, anonymous telephone interview. Despite the disturbing nature of their role, most ICE investigators are coping well. To the extent that investigators find their role to be stressful, some of the causes of this stress relate to generic workplace issues. To the extent that exposure to ICE contributes to workplace stress, the effects do not seem to be accumulative, that is, they are not a function of the extent of exposure to ICE material. There is, however, no universal ICE investigator experience. In particular, there is a small number of investigators who experience clinically-significant adverse reactions to their exposure to ICE material

Environmental sustainability: A case of policy implementation failure?

© 2017 by the author. For a generation, governments around the world have been committed to sustainable development as a policy goal. This has been supported by an array of new policies ranging from international agreements, to national strategies, environmental laws at many levels of government, regional programs, and local plans. Despite these efforts, decades of scientific monitoring indicate that the world is no closer to environmental sustainability and in many respects the situation is getting worse. This paper argues that a significant contributing factor to this situation is policy implementation failure. A systematic review of the literature reveals that the failure to achieve the intended outcomes of environmental policies is due to economic, political and communication factors. Conflict between the objectives of environmental policies and those focused on economic development, a lack of incentives to implement environmental policies, and a failure to communicate objectives to key stakeholders are all key factors that contribute to the inability to attain environmental sustainability