Criminal career progression among serious youthful offenders in Australia

An important question from research on criminal careers is whether the processes that generate participation in criminal activity are similar to those that drive offending frequency among those who have initiated. This article considers basic demographic correlates asking whether those factors are associated with both initial and sustained early adulthood criminality in Australia. Three findings emerged from the study: (1) the offenders exhibited high levels of criminal activity during early adulthood; (2) males were more likely than females to offend and offend at higher rates as adults; and (3) Indigenous youth were more likely than non-Indigenous youth to offend and offend at higher rates as adults. Overall, the study results showed that basic correlates of crime were linked to both participation and frequency of offending in early adulthood—even within a sample of serious offenders. The article addresses the theoretical implications of the findings and directions for future research.     

Responding to the Structural Violence of Migrant Domestic Work: Insights from Participatory Action Research with Migrant Caregivers in Canada

This study explores international domestic workers’ response to employer abuse and exploitation following changes to Canada’s Live-in-Caregiver Program in 2014. This research followed an interpretive policy analysis research design, using feminist, participatory, and action research methods. University-based researchers, advocates, and peer researchers collaborated to develop and implement the project’s research and advocacy goals. Thirty-one caregivers in Toronto and Calgary participated in individual and/or focus group interviews to discuss access to permanent residence, working conditions and forms of support. Many shared examples of labor exploitation and psychological hardship due to precarious work conditions and long periods of family separation. Barriers to accessing services and fear of losing status led the majority of caregivers to rely primarily on informal networks for mutual aid and support. This paper identifies how changes in Canada’s temporary foreign worker program for live-in-caregivers exacerbates the structural violence of migrant care work, where the risk for abuse, exploitation, and risk of losing status is normalized. Migrant caregivers accept the precarious work conditions with the promise of permanent residence and the chance to improve their lives for themselves and their children. Towards envisioning improvements in social service delivery, our research highlighted the need for social services to increase outreach and safety planning for migrant workers who are vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and the loss of legal immigration status. Our research also supports grassroots advocacy to call for all migrant workers to be granted permanent resident status upon arrival to ameliorate the structural violence of migrant labor.     

Truancy Intervention Reduces Crime: Results from a Randomized Field Trial

Educational attainment is a fundamental cornerstone to success throughout the life-course. As a result, ensuring that young people remain in school and are not truant is critical. Although the importance of truancy as a risk factor for many adverse outcomes, including crime, has been well-documented, much less methodologically rigorous work has been undertaken to evaluate potentially promising prevention and intervention strategies. This paper uses a randomized field trial method to test how a partnership between police and schools targeting truancy impacts offending in a sample of high-risk truanting young people. We find that the truancy intervention reduces offending and we discuss the implications for practice and directions for future research.     

Perceptions and experiences of intrusive behavior and stalking within a culture

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have compared perceptions and experiences of intrusive activity and stalking between countries and the present work compares subcultures within a single country. Singaporean women (89 Chinese, 69 Indian and 68 Malay) with similar age profiles completed a modified version of the ‘Stalking: International perceptions and prevalence’ questionnaire (SIPPQ). This contained measures of individual perceptions and experiences of a range of 47 intrusive behaviors, and a measure of stalking. Between the three ethnic groups, few differences were found in terms of how unacceptable the 47 intrusive acts were judged to be. The small number of differences identified related to courtship behaviors. Women across ethnicities reported largely the same experiences of intrusive behaviors, differing on just two of the 47 behaviors. This suggests that overarching national attitudes towards women are better determinants of the types of intrusive behaviors they are likely to experience, as opposed to their subculture. Finally, no differences were found in stalking rates between the three ethnic groups, but the overall stalking rate within the sample was high at 54.9%. This finding may provide impetus to increase awareness of stalking in Singapore, given that it was only recently criminalized in the sovereign city–state.     

Framing and perceptions of stalking: the influence of conduct severity and the perpetrator–target relationship

Research has demonstrated that the way in which questions are presented (i.e. framed) has the capacity to influence responses to subsequent questions. In the context of stalking, perception research has often been framed in terms of whether or not particular behaviours constitute stalking. The current research investigates whether the framing of the opening question (question frame), conduct severity and the perpetrator–target relationship influence perceptions of stalking. Two studies employed experimental 3×3 independent factorial designs: one to examine question frame and conduct severity, the other to examine question frame and the perpetrator–target relationship. Participants in both studies (total N=449) were presented with vignettes and asked to answer six questions relating to the behaviour described. Question frame was found to impact on the classification of behaviour, with a greater proportion of participants indicating that the behaviour represented harassment or stalking rather than an illegal act. Consistent with previous research, conduct severity and the perpetrator–target relationship influenced perceptions of stalking. However, there was no evidence to suggest that the framing of the opening question influenced these perceptions. The implications of these findings for previous perception research are discussed.     

Reporting guidelines for social and psychological intervention trials: considering the special context of crime and justice interventions

We comment on Grant and colleagues’ proposal to develop an extension to the CONSORT statement for social interventions, and propose that crime and justice interventions should be considered a special case, due to the added complexities of reporting consent, coercion and harm in criminal justice experiments.     

Environmental protection and US–Asia relations: a policy of disconnect

Despite the post-September 11 focus on regional security and the continued emphasis on regional economic cooperation, environmental degradation should not be overlooked as an important issue for US policy in and relationship with the Asia-Pacific. It is an important issue in its own right, presenting the countries of the region with ecological, economic and social (human security) challenges. There are both ethical and instrumental impulses for the United States, as a rich indus­trialised country and as a disproportionate consumer of resources and polluter of global waste, to provide environmental assistance to the Asia-Pacific. Despite global demands that the ‘new’ new world (environmental) order should be based on solidarity and collective responsibility, neither US environmental policy towards the region nor the regional consequences of its international environmental policy more generally meet this test. The US is fundamentally self-regarding rather than other-regarding in the various dimensions of its environmental relationship with the region. The consequences for both the region and for the US may be substantial. Continued environmental degradation in the region has the potential to undermine other US policy goals, in terms of its reputation, it economic objectives and even its more orthodox geopolitical security objectives.     

Policing Australia’s ‘heroin drought’: using an agent-based model to simulate alternative outcomes

Our paper examines how street-level drug markets adapt to a macro-level disruption to the supply of heroin, under three experimental conditions of street-level drug law enforcement: random patrol, hot-spot policing and problem-orientated policing. We utilize an agent-based model to explore the relative impact of abstractions of these three law enforcement strategies after simulating an ‘external shock’ to the supply of heroin to the street-level drug market. We use 3 years of data, which include the period of the ‘heroin drought’ in Melbourne (Australia) that commenced in late 2000 and early 2001, to measure changes in a selected range of crime and harm indicators under the three policing conditions. Our results show that macro-level disruptions to drug supply have a limited impact on street-level market dynamics when there is a ready replacement drug. By contrast, street-level police interventions are shown to vary in their capacity to alter drug market dynamics. Importantly, our laboratory abstraction of problem-orientated policing is shown to be the optimal strategy to disrupt street-level injecting-drug markets, reduce crimes and minimize harm, regardless of the type of drug being supplied to the market.