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Kidnapping/abduction is defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as the unlawful seizing or taking away of another person either against that person's will, or against the will of any parent or legal guardian of that person. Between 1995 and 2004 the rate of kidnapping/abduction increased from 2.5 to 3.8 victims per 100,000 population. Throughout this period the rate of kidnapping of persons aged 19 or less has been more than twice as high as of persons aged 20 and over. Victims of abduction are more likely to be female than male.

The annual Australian Bureau of Statistics publication Recorded crime - victims, Australia provides a breakdown of selected offence categories by location in which the recorded offence took place. Residential locations include dwellings, outbuildings and residential land; community locations include streets, footpaths and public transport; other locations include retail premises, recreational areas and all other locations. The data below exclude victims where the offence location was not specified. This ranges from 1.2 to 4.6 per cent, depending on offence category.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Recorded crime - victims annual publication, the rate of reported sexual assault has increased in the period 1993-2003. In 1993 the rate was 69 recorded victims of sexual assault per 100,000 population; by 2003 the rate had steadily climbed to 92 reported victims per 100,000 persons. This increase does not necessarily reflect an increase in the prevalence of sexual assault, but is likely to be influenced by an increase in reporting incidents to police.

Since the publication of The age of criminal responsibility (Urbas 2000), some jurisdictions have revised their legislation, confirming a trend over the last 20 years to uniformity in age limits for criminal responsibility. In the Australian Capital Territory, the Criminal Code 2002 Div 2.3.1 now deals with the criminal responsibility of children. From 1 July 2005 in Victoria, the age jurisdiction of the criminal division of the Children's Court has increased from 17 to 18 years.

Managed by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the Australian component of the 2004 International Crime Victimisation Survey (ICVS) randomly surveyed 6,000 people aged 16 or older. To assess the experience of crime among migrants, an extra 1001 individuals born, or whose parents were born, in Vietnam or the Middle East were surveyed. The chart below compares the five-year rates of victimisation for the main sample and the Middle Eastern/Vietnamese sample.

The Australian Institute of Criminology has collected data on homicides in Australia since 1989. Homicide includes murder, manslaughter and infanticide, but excludes driving-related fatalities unless these occur in the course of a criminal event. Homicide is regarded as the most accurately recorded crime in Australia and is thus a reliable indicator of the most serious violent crime. The latest figures indicate that there were 288 incidents and 305 victims of homicide in Australia during 2003-04.

An international comparison of the perceived level of corruption among public officials and politicians in 159 countries has found that Australia is in the top 10 countries least likely to exhibit this type of corruption. Transparency International and the University of Passau compile the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) from expert surveys of business people and analysts from around the world, including local country experts. Scores can range from 10 ('highly clean') to 0 ('highly corrupt'). This year the scores ranged from 9.7 for Iceland to 1.7 for Chad and Bangladesh.

The Australian Institute of Criminology has collected data and reported on homicides in Australia since 1989. Homicide includes murder, manslaughter and infanticide, but excludes driving-related fatalities unless these occur in the course of a criminal event. In 2003-04 there were 288 incidents involving 305 victims of homicide. The figure below shows a breakdown of the alleged motive of offenders for these homicides. The motive is the alleged primary causal factor that precedes and often leads to the events, the outcome of which is the death of the victim/s.

The Australian Government Attorney-General's Department funded the Australian Institute of Criminology to undertake the Drug Use Careers of Offenders study. The first two parts of the study looked at men and women in prison. The third part comprised research into the lifetime offending and substance use patterns of 371 juveniles, aged 10 to 17 years, incarcerated in Australian juvenile detention centres. The study confirmed that young people sentenced to detention have extensive offending and drug use histories.

Over the past four years the rate of stolen motor vehicles has declined significantly. In 2003-04 there were 88,030 vehicles stolen in Australia. Not unexpectedly trucks, plant/equipment and buses were the least likely to be stolen. Motorcycles were more likely to be stolen than any other type of vehicle, with a theft rate of 15 per 1,000 registrations, followed by vans, sedans and station wagons.

The Australian Institute of Criminology prepared a statistical overview for the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into federal offenders (Australian Law Reform Commission 2005). According to data held by the Attorney-General's Department there were 695 federal prisoners on 13 December 2004. The federal sentencing data record only the most serious federal offence for an offender; in reality they may also have been sentenced on state/territory offences.

The National Deaths in Custody Program (NDICP) is responsible for monitoring the extent and nature of deaths in police, prison and juvenile custody. There were 39 deaths in prison custody in 2004, the same number as recorded in 2003. Overall there has been a decline in numbers of deaths in prison custody since 1995 but the trend lines vary for sentenced and unsentenced prisoners. In 2004 twenty-four deaths were of sentenced prisoners and the remaining 15 deaths were of unsentenced prisoners on remand.

The way in which crime is recorded varies across jurisdictions and over time, so comparing crime rates between countries (and, sometimes, within a country) is not necessarily an accurate indicator of differences in actual levels of crime in those countries. Similarly, crime rate trend data in a single jurisdiction are not necessarily reflective of trends in actual levels of crime. Changes in rates of recorded crime may be the result of changes in the way crime data are collected, or changes in the proportion of victims reporting criminal offences to police.

According to the Productivity Commission's Report on government services 2006, there was a total of 45,201 full-time sworn police officers based in the various Australian jurisdictions in 2004-05. The chart below shows rates of sworn police per 100,000 persons in the six Australian states, and Australia as a whole, over the past five years. Excluded from the data are Australian Federal Police not involved in ACT policing.

According to the Report on government services 2006, government expenditure on justice in Australia totalled $8.4 billion in 2004-05. Justice expenditure includes federal and state government expenditure on corrective services, civil courts, criminal courts and police services. This amounts to approximately nine percent of total spending by all Australian governments, a slight decrease on the 12 percent recorded in 1996-97, when the current format of reporting on government expenditure was adopted.