Media discourse plays a critical role in shaping how crime is understood, influencing both public sentiment and policy debates. In Japan, where population ageing is rapid and family-based care remains culturally valued, eldercide by family caregivers receives considerable media attention. Yet, little is known about how the press frames such incidents. Drawing on qualitative document analysis of 48 articles published between 2000 and 2024 in a leading national newspaper, this study examines a dominant framing that situates eldercide within a caregiving crisis. The findings reveal a consistent narrative that humanises perpetrators, emphasises mental health strain and gendered caregiving roles, and downplays criminal intent. Such portrayals can shift public attention from individual culpability towards collective responsibility and reflect cultural tensions in Japan's long-term care regime. The findings contribute to criminological research on media framing of domestic homicide and illuminate the media's role in shaping societal responses to ageing and care.
Group Violence Intervention (GVI) has been implemented in Swedish welfare-state contexts to address serious violence through coordinated efforts involving police, prison and probation services, and social services. This study explores how implementation dimensions shaped the rollout of GVI in Gothenburg. Using a qualitative design, 35 semi-structured interviews were conducted with GVI-coordinators. The findings highlight legal constraints, role ambiguity, and fragmented structures as barriers, while strategic recruitment, inter-agency collaboration, and structured coordination meetings facilitated implementation. Community engagement emerged as both a challenge and a success factor, with trust and legitimacy proving pivotal. The study underscores the importance of transitioning to formalised role-based responsibilities embedded within organisations. It also emphasises the value of integrating implementation frameworks to support planning, readiness, and contextual adaptation. Despite challenges, the findings show that bridging silos through focused deterrence strategies is feasible in welfare-state settings - provided there is local ownership, legal clarity, and sustained cross-sectoral commitment.
Independent civilian police oversight is often hailed as the best alternative to internal oversight and a necessary component of "democratic policing." However, it remains unclear whether these systems have actually produced the changes they promise, such as reducing police use of force, improving accountability, strengthening public trust, and increasing confidence in both police and oversight institutions. Growing global calls to defund, detask, or abolish the police reflect declining public confidence in oversight systems as symbols of democratic accountability. This study questions that assumption by examining three contrasting cases: South Korea, which relied mainly on internal oversight; Ontario (Canada), which used decentralized independent oversight mechanisms; and South Africa, which adopted a centralized independent oversight model. The study argues that meaningful change depends less on claims of "independence," and more on whether accountability mechanisms operate effectively in practice and produce measurable improvements in police conduct, institutional accountability, and public trust.
This study examines community policing (CP) adoption in four Latin American countries - Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, and Honduras - each characterised by a centralised policing system and unique contextual features. It explores how CP was adopted and what motivated the interest in reshaping domestic policing models with a policy originally developed in the Global North. This research employs a multi-method qualitative approach, integrating archival methods to collect policy documents (n = 97) and primary data from semi-structured interviews with government officials, senior police officers, experts, and international organisation officials (n = 67). The findings reveal a hybrid adoption of CP models with two variations: embedded adoption, integrating CP into a broader existing policing strategies in Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay, whereas Honduras preferred a focused approach with a specialised model. Various motivation types led to CP adoption: ideology-driven, aimed at democratising policing; relationship-driven motivation intended to enhance trust in the police; and pragmatic-driven, focused on addressing crime and insecurity. This study argues that while CP adoption has not fundamentally reshaped policing in these countries, it has primarily served as a model for reorienting service provision to meet public safety objectives. The policy implications underscore the need to comprehensively assess policing models from the Global North before their adoption in the distinct institutional and social landscapes of Latin American countries.
This article studies the transition from sporadic and symbolic inclusion of survivor voices to the formal institutionalisation of survivor leadership in anti-trafficking governance. By examining a variety of engagement models, including government-mandated advisory councils, NGO-led initiatives, and independent survivor-led organisations, the study highlights the differences in survivor involvement across these frameworks. It argues that the institutionalisation of survivor engagement does not, on its own, guarantee meaningful policymaking influence, and that different governance models generate distinct trade-offs between access, autonomy, legitimacy, and power. The analysis draws on interviews with survivor leaders to examine the structural, ethical, and resource-based obstacles that hinder more substantive contributions to policymaking. By critically examining these dynamics, the study highlights the necessity of integrating survivor voices in ways that are not merely consultative but institutionally consequential, contributing to more equitable power-sharing arrangements and to the democratisation of knowledge in anti-trafficking governance.
This paper examines punishment in the Philippines as a penal project shaped by colonial rule, carceral expansion, and the continuing dominance of retributive justice. It argues that, despite the rise of rehabilitative and restorative approaches elsewhere, the Philippine criminal legal system remains strongly oriented towards moral censure, punitive containment, and the uneven punishment of marginalised populations. Drawing on Foucauldian scholarship, postcolonial and decolonial criminology, and historical criminology, the paper traces how Spanish and American colonial administrations institutionalised punishment through spectacle, discipline, and racialised governance. It shows how these logics persist in prolonged pre-trial detention, overcrowded jails, selective criminalisation, and harsh sentencing. The paper also critiques rehabilitative and therapeutic discourses, particularly in drug policy, arguing that they often extend carceral power rather than disrupt it. In response, it turns to abolitionist critiques and Liu's relational paradigm to argue for a penal future grounded in repair, collective responsibility, and culturally resonant forms of justice.
Online romance fraud has received increasing scholarly and policy attention due to its socioeconomic and psychological consequences. While prior research has examined the technical, psychological, and structural conditions that enable these scams, far less is known about the temporal and behavioural processes that shape how individuals enter, sustain, and exit them. This study addresses that gap using qualitative data from publicly available court case files and interviews with active and former offenders. Drawing on Crime Script Analysis (CSA), it maps the sequence of offender behaviour, including pre-entry preparation, operational stages, and pathways out of fraudulent activity. Findings show that romance fraud is not opportunistic but a structured enterprise requiring planning, adaptation, and sustained deception. Exit is commonly triggered by lawenforcement pressure, reduced financial returns, and moments of moral conflict. The study advances cybercrime research by illuminating the dynamics of recruitment, socialisation, and disengagement, with particular attention to Global South contexts.
While volunteers play a pivotal role within policing and the criminal justice system, they are often overlooked in research. Previous research on police volunteers within the Canadian context has focused on auxiliary officers, but few have looked at policing volunteers beyond this group. This article draws upon in-depth interviews to examine the experiences and perceptions of members of a Canadian police volunteer program, Citizens on Patrol. Citizens on Patrol is a Canadian-wide program that uses volunteers to support existing police personnel to address a variety of minor issues and community complaints, as well as perform community outreach. Our findings suggest that COP volunteers play an important role in community safety while simultaneously alleviating some of the pressure on police resources. Volunteers, for the most part, take on roles that are impactful. We discuss the implications of our findings and ways to enhance volunteer experiences at police services.
Substantive justice in policing focuses on the fairness of citizen-police encounter outcomes. Yet, much remains unknown about how substantive justice affects satisfaction with the police. This study provides the first quantitative examination of how substantive justice shapes public satisfaction with the police. The findings not only affirm the importance of substantive justice as the most influential factor in citizen satisfaction with the police but also uncover an additional dimension: substantive justice serves as a key mechanism underlying the differential levels of satisfaction with the police reported by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. It is concluded that Indigenous people's lower satisfaction reflects not only their marginalised social position but also persistent differential treatment by some police officers. This pattern of unequal treatment, resulting from what is termed the residual effect of "rotten apples," warrants further investigation in other social and institutional contexts.
This pilot study empirically investigates the ability of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to mimic human judges' sentencing decisions in criminal cases by comparing sentences generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) with those handed down by human judges. Using real-world datasets, our research revealed a strong correlation between LLM-generated predictions and actual court sentences. We observed significant consistency both across multiple runs of the same model and between different models, thereby demonstrating high internal reliability and inter-model reliability. Moreover, the severity of sentences proposed by the models closely mirrored those handed down by human judges. These findings underscore the potential of LLMs to assist sentencing judges, identify inconsistencies in sentencing, and help legal actors predict case outcomes. Our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on the influence of LLMs in the legal domain, highlighting both the potential benefits and challenges, including significant ethical considerations associated with their application. Possible applications and ethical considerations are briefly discussed.
The objective of this study was to evaluate whether cognitive impulsivity is capable of mediating the relationship between perceived neighbourhood disorder and early adult offending. A sample of 666 (318 males, 348 females) mid- to late-adolescent youth (mean age = 16.25 years) from the Offending, Crime, and Justice Survey (OCJS) served as participants in this study. Four waves of data, with one year between each wave, were used to test the hypothesis that cognitive impulsivity, but not moral neutralisation, would tie perceived neighbourhood disorder during adolescence to early adult offending. Control variables (age, sex, race, household income, parental support, and peer delinquency) were assessed at Wave 1, the independent variable (perceived neighbourhood disorder) and precursors to the two mediating variables (cognitive impulsivity, moral neutralisation) were assessed at Wave 2, the two mediating variables and the precursor to the dependent variable (offence variety) were assessed at Wave 3, and the dependent variable was assessed at Wave 4. A causal mediation analysis revealed a significant indirect effect running from perceived neighbourhood disorder to cognitive impulsivity to early adult offence variety. The direct (unmeditated) effect of perceived neighbourhood disorder on offence variety, the indirect effect of perceived neighbourhood disorder on offence variety via moral neutralisation, and the difference between the two indirect effects were all nonsignificant. The results of this study support the notion that perceived neighbourhood disorder in mid- to late adolescence contributes to offending behaviour two years later by increasing the antisocial thought process of cognitive impulsivity.
This study explores the relationship between political systems and global incarceration trends during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on whether the degree of democracy shapes carceral changes. Using data on 87 countries, it examines post-pandemic incarceration rates, differences between pre- and post-COVID-19 periods, and percent changes in rates as proxies for policy responsiveness. The findings reveal that structural inequality (Gini coefficient) and pre-COVID-19 incarceration levels significantly predict post-COVID-19 rates. However, no significant differences were observed in pre- and post-pandemic rates, and percent changes could not be explained by democracy or other predictors. These results highlight the rigidity of global incarceration systems during crises, challenging assumptions about political systems' impact on justice reforms. The study emphasises the need for policies promoting adaptability and fairness in global criminal justice systems to address systemic issues and inequality effectively.
This paper uses the concept of hybridity as developed by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha to critique and reconstruct the foundations of international criminal law. Examining three aspects of contemporary international criminal justice (its modes of evaluating evidence, its substantive law, and its penal practices), it argues that the system is rooted in eurocentric, liberal notions of criminal justice. In response to this problem, hybrid courts represent a normative opening where western and nonwestern justice traditions can negotiate the nature of justice and law in a fashion that is captured by Bhabha's theory. It concludes with reflections on how hybrid courts can be strengthened to develop a more inclusive model of international criminal justice.
Drug crime among Taiwanese women and juvenile girls is a major problem; however, most prior studies are limited to adults and have undervalued the females' agency in terminating drug use. This exploratory study investigates female adolescents' substance use experiences using an integrated framework of hope and General Strain Theory to document factors at play in adjudicated girls' substance use experiences. Ten study participants were interviewed in depth in a juvenile reform school in Taiwan. Using the storyline approach, the interviews identified three distinct patterns of hope/hopelessness. The Hopelessness and Strain storyline portrayed hope-extinguishing situations pushing some girls to seek out harmful coping mechanisms. The False Hope storyline represents the relationship between using drugs and clinging to unattainable dreams through renewed drug use. The Will and the Ways storyline represents the motivated agency pattern of termination, with storylines highlighting the positive pathways used to rekindle hope and sustain termination.
This paper critically examines global responses to domestic violence, arguing that dominant criminalisation frameworks often fail to provide meaningful protection or long-term justice for survivors. Although many governments frame domestic violence as a problem best addressed through punishment, cross-regional case studies from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe reveal the limits-and at times harms-of carceral approaches. Rather than dismantling patriarchal power structures, punitive responses frequently reproduce the gendered, racialised, and economic hierarchies that sustain violence. Drawing on intersectional feminism, critiques of carceral feminism, and masculinity studies, the paper evaluates both the ideological foundations and practical outcomes of carceral and non-carceral strategies. It also explores the promise and challenges of community-led, restorative, and survivor-centred alternatives. Ultimately, it argues for a reimagined approach to justice that moves beyond the punishment-impunity binary and centres survivor autonomy, structural transformation, and long-term collective safety.
Our study explores the degree of congruence between citizen and police officer experiences of police sexual violence (PSV). We use the content analysis of 327 newspaper stories of police sexual violence (PSV) in South Africa, comparing the experiences of 92 citizens and 27 police officers who were PSV victims. Our analysis implies that police officers who commit PSV tend to "specialize" and focus on one type of victim, be they citizens or fellow police officers. Citizens tend to be more likely to experience rape, while police officers are more likely to experience sexual harassment. Citizens are typically victimised by non-commissioned police officers, while police officers are more likely to be victimised by their supervisors who are either commissioned officers or senior management. The limited information about the criminal process indicates that police officers victimising citizens are more likely to be charged with multiple offences than police officers victimising other police officers.
This study examines how non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery (NSII) became socially constructed as a critical problem in South Korea following the 2024 deepfake sexual abuse crisis. The research reveals how diverse claim makers propelled recognition of NSII as a criminal issue, initiating swift reforms strengthened statutes, victim support, and AI governance. While these measures highlight an innovative, citizen-driven strategy, barriers remain in transnational detection and cross-border cooperation. The study underscores the need for international governance frameworks and suggests that South Korea's grassroots approach offers comparative insights for other jurisdictions seeking to build institutional knowledge and responses to this novel crime.
For serious offences, or for offenders with significant prior criminal histories, home detention offers an alternative to incarceration. House arrest nvolves a restrictive curfew that many offenders perceive as punitive, but probation officers must still establish rapport and secure compliance. One tool for assessing the therapeutic relationship, or working alliance, is the Working Alliance Inventory (WAI). This study compares WAI scores between probation and home detention cases in an urban Canadian setting (N = 186) and examines the association of working alliance ratings with gender, race, age, education, employment status, time under supervision, offence type, prior criminal history, and probation failure. Participants generally reported strong, positive relationships with their probation officers. No significant associations were found between WAI scores and type of supervision (probation vs. home detention), demographic factors, offence type, or length of supervision. Past supervision failure was associated with lower WAI scores, and this difference was statistically significant, though not large in effect size. Future qualitative research is recommended to gain deeper insights into the dynamics of probation officer - client relationships.
Workplace deviance can have negative effects on the employee, organisation, profession, and larger society. Thus, it is important to better understand the nature of workplace deviance in the hopes of implementing policies and practices to reduce its prevalence and harmful effects. In order to better understand workplace deviance, the theoretical framework of Akers' social learning theory may be particularly useful. Following a growing body of scholarship in this area, the main goal of this research study was to examine the predictive utility of social learning theory in explaining workplace deviance. Utilising survey data from a sample of 585 hotel employees in Iran, we tested both direct and indirect effects of social learning on workplace deviance. Overall, the findings demonstrate that differential associations, definitions favourable to crime, differential reinforcement, and imitation all had predictive utility in explaining workplace deviance. Specific results, policy implications, and study limitations are discussed.
