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Foreword | Studies of the specific deterrent effect of criminal sanctions have mostly focused on prison. This is, in some ways, unfortunate as non-custodial penalties are far more frequently imposed than custodial penalties. In this study, the authors use propensity score matching to assess whether the length of a bond or suspended sentence makes any difference to the time to first new offence. The results suggest that it does and that offenders given long bonds or suspended sentences take longer to reoffend than offenders given short bonds or suspended sentences.

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 | Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is a legislated response to youth offending, which has been in place in all Australian states and territories for nearly two decades. Restorative justice conferences are meetings between young offenders, their victims and supporters to discuss the offence, its impact and what the young person can do to repair harms caused by the offending behaviour.

Foreword | There is a lack of international and Australian research about offenders who have been convicted of human trafficking, slavery and slave-like practices. In Australia, 15 offenders have been convicted of such crimes. The publicly available court judgments about these offenders contain invaluable information about the characteristics and motivations of offenders, the intersection of trafficking offending with other forms of criminality and the common methods offenders use to control and exploit their victims.

Foreword | Public policy initiatives to redress parental child sexual offenders have been hindered by the absence of an offending profile that characterises this core group of intrafamilial offenders. Drawing on data from a sample of 213 offenders, this study augments knowledge about sex offender typologies by identifying ten key descriptive features of parental offenders.

Foreword | Digital technologies are often considered effective methods of deterring or preventing crime. New forms of surveillance have particular appeal when attempting to reduce violence in the night-time economy, given ongoing concerns over perceived increases in the frequency and severity of reported assaults. This study examines the rationales for adopting compulsory patron ID scanning as a key method of reducing violence in and around licensed venues in the Victorian regional city of Geelong.

Foreword | Legal threshold quantities for drug trafficking, over which possession of an illicit drug is deemed ‘trafficking’ as opposed to ‘personal use’ are used in most Australian states and territories. Yet, in spite of known risks from adopting such thresholds, most notably of unjustified conviction of users as traffickers, the capacity of Australian legal thresholds to deliver proportional sanctioning has been subject to limited research.

Foreword | Victim/survivors of human trafficking involving partner migration employ diverse help-seeking strategies, both formal and informal, to exit their exploitative situations.

Foreword | While there is a sizable body of research on intimate partner homicide in general, there has been limited focus on intimate partner homicide involving people in same-sex relationships.

The present study, one of the first of its kind, uses data from the National Homicide Monitoring Program (NHMP) within a context of national and international research to describe what is known about the trends and key characteristics of same-sex intimate partner homicide in Australia.

Foreword | Information and communications technology (ICT) may be the target of criminal activity, as well as a tool used to facilitate criminal acts.

Foreword | Indonesia has one of the highest rates of workers seeking employment abroad, with the majority of these workers being females employed in domestic service. Due to the nature of recruitment, the process of migration and the location and characteristics of the work, Indonesian migrant domestic workers may in some instances be at risk of abuse, exploitation and human trafficking.

Foreword | Although Australia has achieved significant reductions in drink driving since the 1980s, it continues to be a leading cause of road fatalities and injuries. A range of countermeasures have been used to address drink driving, although their effectiveness can be affected by a range of implementation issues.

Foreword | A multifaceted strategy is required to effectively combat organised crime. A key element of preventing and responding to organised criminal activity is to target how individuals become involved in illicit activities and to develop effective methods of preventing their recruitment.

Foreword | Online fraud occurs when an individual or a business responds in some manner to an unsolicited invitation received via the internet and suffers financial or other detrimental effects as a result. In 2010–11, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012) found that over 1.2 million Australians (6.7% of the population aged 15 years and over) had been a victim of personal fraud, losing approximately $1.4b in the preceding 12 months. More than half of these victims (55.7%) were contacted via the internet or email (online victimisation).