Despite legal reforms, there has been little improvement in police, prosecutor, and court handling of rape and sexual assault. In the past 15 years in Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Scotland, and the United States, victimization surveys show that 14 percent of sexual violence victims report the offense to the police. Of these, 30 percent proceed to prosecution, 20 percent are adjudicated in court, 12.5 percent are convicted of any sexual offense, and 6.5 percent are convicted of the original offense charged. In the past 35 years, average conviction rates have declined from 18 percent to 12.5 percent, although they have not fallen in all countries. Significant country differences are evident in how cases are handled and where in the legal process attrition is most likely. There is some good news: a victim's "good" character and credibility and stranger relations are less important than they once were in police or court outcomes. However, evidence of nonconsent (witness evidence, physical injuries to the victim, suspect's use of a weapon) continues to be important. 1 Since September 2007, New Zealand has completed a rape attrition study (Triggs et al. 2009). Other studies that are planned or under way include the Irish Rape Attrition Project (2010), a rape attrition study of 11 U.K. and European countries (Lovett and Kelly 2009), the Understanding Attrition in Rape Cases Project in Sussex (McMillan and Thomas 2008), and a rape attrition study planned for South Africa (Gender, Health and Justice Research Unit 2008). Johnson, Ollus, and Nevala (2008) report estimates from the International Violence Against Women Survey that we cite when relevant. 2 We initially combined England and Wales and Scotland but then decided to treat them separately because their rape law and criminal procedures differ, as do their attrition rates over time. In Scotland, unlike England and Wales, the definition of rape is still gender specific, although this is changing. The Scottish criminal justice system includes an additional stage, that of the procurator fiscal, who takes on some duties of the police and the prosecution (personal communication with Michele Burman, January 24, 2008).

Sexual offending by young people is increasingly viewed as a social problem that requires a strong response, but there is little research on the legal treatment of youthful sex offenders. On the one hand, these youths may be viewed as potential future sex offenders; on the other hand, because of their youth and immaturity they may be considered more reformable than adults and their behaviour more excusable. This paper builds on an archival study of 385 sexual offence cases, which were disposed in court and by conference and formal caution, in South Australia from 1995 to 2001. Drawing on the transcripts of 55 cases sentenced by judges (i.e., the most legally serious offences), we analyse sentencing discourses and outcomes using both the explicit and latent content of the sentencing remarks. Specifically, we explore the judges' orientations and aims when sentencing adolescent sex offenders, how judges reconcile the seriousness of offending and the youthfulness of offenders, and how they balance the competing interests of victims and offenders. Two major findings emerge. First, the cases fell in a three-way typology patterned by the victims' age, the context of the offence, and the offender's criminal history. Second, our study suggests that while youth court judges consider sexual offending against children as very serious and are concerned by future offending, they do not adopt a punitive approach, but rather a therapeutic and rehabilitative perspective at sentencing.

The Internet is a decentralized structure that offers speedy communication, has a global reach and provides anonymity, a characteristic invaluable for committing illegal activities. In parallel with the spread of the Internet, cybercrime has rapidly evolved from a relatively low volume crime to a common high volume crime. A typical example of such a crime is the spreading of spam emails, where the content of the email tries to entice the recipient to click a URL linking to a malicious Web site or downloading a malicious attachment. Analysts attempting to provide intelligence on spam activities quickly find that the volume of spam circulating daily is overwhelming; therefore, any intelligence gathered is representative of only a small sample, not of the global picture. While past studies have looked at automating some of these analyses using topic-based models, i.e. separating email clusters into groups with similar topics, our preliminary research investigates the usefulness of applying authorship-based models for this purpose. In the first phase, we clustered a set of spam emails using an authorship-based clustering algorithm. In the second phase, we analysed those clusters using a set of linguistic, structural and syntactic features. These analyses reveal that emails within each cluster were likely written by the same author, but that it is unlikely we have managed to group together all spam produced by each group. This problem of high purity with low recall, has been faced in past authorship research. While it is also a limitation of our research, the clusters themselves are still useful for the purposes of automating analysis, because they reduce the work needing to be performed. Our second phase revealed useful information on the group that can be utilized in future research for further analysis of such groups, for example, identifying further linkages behind spam campaigns.

Our aim was to determine the overall rates of general and sexual re-offending of youth (i.e. aged under 18 at the time of offence) charged with sexual offences, ranging from indecent exposure to rape, over 6.5 years in South Australia and whose cases were finalised in court, by conference and by formal caution (N ¼ 365). Controlling for previous offending, we examined if re-offending varied by site of finalisation or by referral to Mary Street, a specialist treatment program. Follow-up times ranged from six to 84 months. We applied a parametric form of survival analysis by fitting the Weibull 'mixture model' to the Kaplan-Meier cumulative distribution of failure times (time to re-offend). Covariates, such as prior offending or referral to Mary Street, were introduced to test for differences in survival rates, immune proportions or both between groups. By the cut-off date, 54% of youth had been charged with new nonsexual offences but only 9% with new sexual offences. Court youth had a higher rate of re-offending than conference youth, but these differences were largely explained by prior offending. For the subgroup with no previous offending, however, a significantly slower rate of re-offending was observed for conference youth and for those who were referred to Mary Street. We were able to control for the main effect of prior offending, but complex interactions between co-variates such as offence types, early admissions to offending and legal and therapeutic responses could not be disentangled in our small sample, and we could not explore factors linked specifically to sexual re-offending. Future research should examine

This paper explores the nature of groups engaged in cybercrime. It briefly outlines the definition and scope of cybercrime, theoretical and empirical challenges in addressing what is known about cyber offenders, and the likely role of organized crime groups (OCG). We give examples of known cases that illustrate individual and group behaviour, and motivations of typical offenders, including state actors. Different types of cybercrime and different forms of criminal organisation are described drawing on the typology suggested by McGuire (2012). It is apparent that a wide variety of organisational structures are involved in cybercrime. Enterprise or profit-oriented activities, and especially cybercrime committed by state actors, appear to require leadership, structure, and specialisation. By contrast, protest activity tends to be less organized, with weak (if any) chain of command.