Family violence continues to receive close attention in Australia. However, research, policy and intervention have predominantly focused on protecting women and children from violent male partners. While adolescent family violence and elder abuse have attracted increasing scholarly and policy attention, violence perpetrated by adult children against parents (adult filial violence) remains underexplored, particularly in relation to non-fatal violence and legal responses. This article examines how adult filial violence involving young or emerging adults is understood and responded to within the Victorian legal and service context. Drawing on focus groups ( n = 18) with lawyers and support workers, we explore practitioners’ experiences of implementing legal and service responses. Four overlapping and intersecting themes emerged: blurred parental roles – shame, stigma and the implication of accountability; the intersectional complexity of adult filial violence, including trauma, disability, substance use and housing insecurity; the search for therapeutic support; and the punitiveness of law. Participants consistently framed adult filial violence as a social rather than a legal problem, emphasising parents’ prioritisation of safety alongside care and concern for their adult children. The findings highlight the limitations of existing legal responses, the risks of criminal charges being laid when police are called and the need for greater recognition of adult filial violence, alongside the development of more nuanced, therapeutic and non-carceral responses attuned to its relational and social dynamics.
Research on hacking has often contrasted “hackers” and “non-hackers”, while paying less attention to heterogeneity within hacking. Drawing on the General Theory of Crime and personality frameworks (Big Five and Dark Triad), this study examines (a) differences between individuals reporting any hacking involvement and those reporting none and (b) how individual differences relate to involvement across behavioural domains, distinguishing illicit/unauthorised black-hat behaviours from grey-hat and white-hat behaviours. Using an online survey of adults in Portugal ( N = 590) recruited through technology-related educational, professional and online communities, we assessed self-control, personality traits and self-reported hacking involvement. Compared with non-hackers, hackers reported lower self-control and agreeableness and higher neuroticism, machiavellianism and psychopathy. At the behavioural-domain level, black-hat (illicit/unauthorised) involvement was associated with lower self-control and higher psychopathy and machiavellianism. Grey-hat involvement was positively associated with machiavellianism and negatively with agreeableness, whereas white-hat involvement was positively associated with machiavellianism and negatively with openness to experience. Given the smaller number of hackers who reported detailed behaviours ( n = 84), the analyses across behavioural types are exploratory. These findings refine criminological accounts of cyber-offending by differentiating behavioural domains within hacking and suggest that prevention and intervention efforts may benefit from targeting risk profiles rather than treating hackers as a homogeneous group.
There has been considerable attention on young people and bail in recent years in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW). Legislative changes in 2024 and extended in 2025 have made it twice as hard for young people who commit certain offences while on bail to receive subsequent bail. In response to these reforms and a rising remand population, Youth Justice NSW temporarily augmented its bail support programmes and now provides formal supervision to some young people on bail where offending has not yet been proven – something the government agency has historically resisted due to concerns about net-widening and the undermining of young people's presumption of innocence. This article considers nine rarely published decisions of the Supreme Court of NSW to explore judicial opinions on youth bail support programmes and examine the implications of modifying pre-trial supervision policies in NSW. In doing so, this article uses these decisions to explore the broader policy considerations behind programmes that utilise needs-based support and formal supervision to increase a young person's likelihood of receiving or remaining on bail. In particular, it explores the potential impact of these programmes on net-widening and young people's presumption of innocence. It recommends that Youth Justice NSW's temporary Bail Casework programme be offered to more young people at risk of remand as a way to decrease reliance on harmful pre-trial detention and reduce the remand population while addressing issues impacting potential bail non-compliance.
This study examines whether the COVID-19 period coincides with structural breaks in Aotearoa New Zealand recorded crime and whether break timing differs across offence categories. Monthly report-date victimisation counts from the Aotearoa New Zealand Police Recorded Crime Victim Statistics are analysed from July 2014 to January 2025 across nine offence groupings. Log-transformed series are modelled with seasonal controls and long-run trend terms. Structural change is assessed with the Bai-Perron endogenous break test, which searches all candidate months for the dates at which the level or trend of a series changes, using wild-bootstrap inference and information-criterion selection of multiple breaks; corroborating stability diagnostics are reported as sensitivity analyses. Magnitudes are characterised through a centred pre–post regime comparison with heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation-consistent inference, and a decomposition separates persistent change from recovery after the restriction period. The results indicate widespread but non-universal instability and reveal three timing pathways: near-onset breaks for opportunity-sensitive property offences, pre-pandemic breaks for selected violence-related categories consistent with shifting baselines, and delayed breaks in late 2021 to mid-2022 that are consistent with, though not uniquely attributable to, adaptation and digitalisation. Overall, the findings support a multi-phase interpretation of pandemic-era crime change and underscore the importance of aligning inference about disruption mechanisms with offence-specific opportunity structures and measurement conditions in recorded crime.
Much previous research on fear of crime has focused on why some individuals experience higher levels of fear than others. However, a growing body of literature examines place-based fear of crime and perceived unsafe locations, indicating a shift in focus from individuals to locations as units of analysis. Much previous research is, however, mainly focused on urban areas, with less being known about this dimension of fear and unsafety across other contexts along the urban-rural continuum. By means of a purpose-built digital mapping tool, the current study examines where unsafe locations are situated and what characterises them, when and why they are perceived as unsafe, and the extent to which there are differences in perceived unsafe locations between sex and age groups. With a convenience sample of 256 participants, reporting a total of 447 unsafe locations across two small towns (approx. 3,400 and 10,700 inhabitants) located near a regional centre in southern Sweden, the results show that unsafe locations tend to be spatially concentrated, and cluster close to specific features of the built environment. Time of the day and the presence of both physical and social disorder seem to be important for how locations are perceived. Furthermore, perceived unsafe locations in semi-rural areas seem to be slightly less dependent on sex and age of the respondent compared to other operationalisations of fear and unsafety, with more similarities than differences in the geography of fear and reasons for unsafety at specific locations. The results from the current study support the notion that place-based perceptions of unsafety may be a less subjective phenomenon compared to other dimensions of fear of crime and may offer a more practically relevant approach for practitioners.
