In this study we examine the internal (domestic) sex trafficking of British children using unique data from six major police investigations. This particular type of internal sex trafficking (sometimes known as ‘street grooming’) has been popularly conceptualised as a highly sophisticated, skilled and well-organised phenomenon. This study shows that this characterisation does not withstand empirical scrutiny. Instead, the routine activities and everyday associations of both offenders and victims are shown to play key roles in facilitating, sustaining and spreading the abuse. While the criminal acts associated with internal child sex trafficking can be atrocious, the people, places and processes involved are shown to be far from exceptional. In this respect, the results may be unsettling: they undermine explanations of an emotive crime that rest on reassuring but ultimately naive errors of attribution. We argue that it is important, however, that preventative strategies are underpinned not by sensationalised narrative and untested assumptions but by sober and robust assessments of appropriate empirical data. The paper contributes to the theoretical and empirical literature on opportunity theories of crime, on human trafficking and on child sexual abuse/exploitation. While the sample size is not especially large (55 offenders and 43 victims), this study helps to expand a sorely limited knowledge base on a topical threat. It is also distinguished by its hard-to-access data and novel analytical approach. The work is likely to interest a broad and international audience of academics, practitioners and policy makers concerned with crime prevention and child protection.

This paper uses transportation data to estimate how daily spatio-temporal shifts in population influence the distribution of crime over a city’s census tracts (CTs). A “funnel hypothesis” states that these daily flows are central for crime concentrations within a city. We present arguments for and against funneling prior to empirical analysis. A municipal transport agency in a large city in Eastern Canada surveyed 66,100 households about daily trips for work, shopping, recreation, and school. This allowed us to link inflows of visitors to numbers of property and violent crimes for 506 CTs. We find strong support for a funneling effect. Daily visitors have a major impact on distributions over this city for both violent and property crimes. Daily spatio-temporal shifts could be significantly more important than fixed residential factors for distributing crime over urban space.

By any standard, there is a serious problem of crime on the public transport system in El Salvador. Guided by crime opportunity theory, this study undertook a rapid assessment of the problem consisting of a systematic observation of public transport in El Salvador and focus group discussions with passengers, bus operators, police and bus company owners/managers. The purposes were (1) to describe the main forms of crime and disorder afflicting the system, (2) to identify features of the system that contribute to the high levels of crime and disorder, and (3) to identify preventive measures, consistent with international experience. A program of situational crime prevention measures was identified which consisted of two main kinds: (1) measures relating to the operations of the bus system as a whole, intended to help to create a more orderly and secure transport environment and, (2) more specific measures designed to reduce opportunities for crimes occurring on buses or at bus stops, such as homicides, robberies, and sexual assaults on women. Future research and implementation of the preventive measures are discussed.

Rooted in the near repeat phenomenon and police crime analysis, a crime “flare up” or micro-time hot spot is the emergence of several closely-related crimes within a few minutes’ travel distance from one another. It occurs within 1–2 weeks and can last several weeks or months before running its course and cooling down. A micro-time hot spot is a type of crime pattern identified by police crime analysts to guide short-term police response, particularly directed patrol. Published work by these authors has examined a subset of the 5 years of data to test the effectiveness of the Port St. Lucie, FL Police Department’s response to micro-time hot spots. Those quasi-experimental studies found separately for burglary and theft from vehicle occurring in residential areas that micro-time hot spots receiving police response had nearly 20 % fewer subsequent crimes than those receiving no police response. This study examines all 121 residential burglary and 163 residential theft from vehicle micro-time hot spots receiving police response to understand how two factors of police response dosage (i.e., the amount of directed patrol and how quickly directed patrol is deployed) are related to the amount of subsequent crime. Separate negative binominal analyses for each crime type showed that more directed patrols per day were related to lower levels of subsequent crime for both crime types, and a quicker response was related to lower crime for residential theft from vehicle. That is, the more and quicker the response, the quicker resolution and cooling off of the micro-time hot spot. The findings were stronger for residential burglary, and a visual examination of first standard deviation confident intervals of directed patrol rate by crime suggests that between four and six directed patrols per day in residential burglary micro-time hot spots was optimal. Although the data are from one police agency, these promising results support future research and provide guidance to police for implementing directed patrol in short-term hot spots of property crime.

This paper examines the crime prevention measures embedded in the Australian vehicle registration system. It builds upon a body of existing literature that has shown how changes to systems can generate positive crime reduction impacts. The crime prevention measures that have been introduced in Australia since the late 1990’s have included proof of identity checks, checks of available databases, identity inspections for inter-state vehicles and close scrutiny of repairable written-off vehicles resubmitted for registration. These changes would appear to have reduced the number of opportunities available to re-register a stolen vehicle, which may have had an impact on profit-motivated vehicle theft. However, there remain a number of ways in which a profit can be generated from vehicle theft. Within the registration system, there would still appear to be methods of circumventing existing controls. More importantly, there would appear to have been a shift in modus operandi towards dismantling a vehicle for its parts and selling the remainder for scrap. These channels of disposal have grown in recent years, thanks in part to weak regulation of these sectors. This may have concentrated disposal methods for stolen vehicles into the vehicle dismantling and wrecking sectors, which may ultimately aid crime control measures aimed at further reducing profit-motivated vehicle theft.

Child sexual abuse is an issue that generates strong emotions, but scientific analysis of the problem demands dispassionate objectivity. This paper explores the tension between these two opposing responses. The scientific analysis of child sexual abuse can produce results that conflict with accepted wisdom. Research findings, such as those showing that victims of child sexual abuse do not necessarily suffer long-term psychological harm, can be misinterpreted to suggest support for the normalisation of child sexual abuse and risk provoking a backlash. In order to develop effective evidence-based prevention strategies researchers may need to challenge popularly held beliefs about child sexual abuse, taking care to do so in a way that recognises the sensitivities surrounding the topic.

Transit stations are acknowledged as particularly criminogenic settings. Transit stations may serve as crime “generators,” breeding crime because they bring together large volumes of people at particular geographies and times. They may also serve as crime “attractors,” providing well-known opportunities for crimes. This paper explores the node and place characteristics that can transform Washington DC, Metro stations to generators and attractors of different crimes at different times of the day. The crime-generating and crime-attracting characteristics of stations are modeled with Negative Binomial Regression analysis. To reflect the temporal trends in crime, crime counts are stratified into three temporal groups: peak hours, off-peak day hours, and off-peak night hours. The findings from this study not only suggest that stations assume different nodal and place-based crime-generating and crime-attracting characteristics, but also these roles vary for different crimes and different times. The level of activity and accessibility of a station, the level of crime at a station, and the connectedness of a station to other stations are consistent indicators of high crime rate ratios. Different characteristics of a station—such as being a remote station or belonging to a high or low socioeconomic status block group—are significant correlates for particular crime outcomes such as disorderly conduct, robbery, and larceny.

It is well known that, due to that inherent differences in their underlying causal mechanisms, different types of crime will have variable impacts on different groups of people. Furthermore, the locations of vulnerable groups of people are highly temporally dynamic. Hence an accurate estimate of the true population at risk in a given place and time is vital for reliable crime rate calculation and hotspot generation. However, the choice of denominator is fraught with difficulty because data describing popular movements, rather than simply residential location, are limited. This research will make use of new ‘crowd-sourced’ data in an attempt to create more accurate estimates of the population at risk for mobile crimes such as street robbery. Importantly, these data are both spatially and temporally referenced and can therefore be used to estimate crime rate significance in both space and time. Spatio-temporal cluster hunting techniques will be used to identify crime hotspots that are significant given the size of the ambient population in the area at the time.

The banning of stolen handsets from networks has been around for 20 years, but remains little used internationally. Where used, its effectiveness is hindered by implementation problems, reprogramming, easy fencing opportunities, and international trafficking. Kill-switches where the user remotely disables a handset and deletes data have potential but, if non-permanent, are likely to experience similar limitations. This study proposes a set of responses to be adopted by national governments with international coordination.

BackgroundResearch on domestic violence (DV) sentencing, post-conviction, has mostly focused on incarceration and re-education programs, ignoring more than a dozen other components of the criminal sentence. Therefore, little is known, overall, about the breadth of DV sentencing, antecedents that may shape the content of the sentence, and a possible relationship between the criminal sentence and a theorized natural process believed to significantly reduce DV recidivism simply as a function of aging.ResultsData from this empirical study (N = 1,810) reveals rates of female DV recidivism decrease by about 2.56% per year, between ages 22–61, and males by about 3.13% per year between ages 28–60. These data closely match Federal Bureau of Investigation rates for recidivism, by age and sex, for violent crime in general. The study also identified 16 sentencing components used by judges in DV cases. Logistic regression on data from a randomly selected subset (n = 366), using the 16 sentencing components as dichotomous outcomes, regressed against 49 antecedent variables, illuminated a number of factors that have a significant relationship with the content of individual DV sentences, including many extra investigative actions that police officers can operationalize when investigating DV crime.ConclusionConfirmation of a natural process that diminishes rates of DV recidivism as a function of aging demonstrates the need to factor this effect into any equation designed to assess the effectiveness of DV sentencing, or re-education/treatment programs upon rates of recidivism. It also confirms that the natural process is an important part of the milieu in which the criminal sentence is operationalized. The results also demonstrate the need for police to thoroughly investigate all DV crime, and to list multiple charges whenever the facts support doing so, because doing so significantly raises rates of inclusion of several sentencing components.