Marine fisheries are in crisis, requiring twice the fishing effort of the 1950s to catch the same quantity of fish, and with many fleets operating beyond economic or ecological sustainability. A possible consequence of diminishing returns in this race to fish is serious labour abuses, including modern slavery, which exploit vulnerable workers to reduce costs. Here, we use the Global Slavery Index (GSI), a national-level indicator, as a proxy for modern slavery and labour abuses in fisheries. GSI estimates and fisheries governance are correlated at the national level among the major fishing countries. Furthermore, countries having documented labour abuses at sea share key features, including higher levels of subsidised distant-water fishing and poor catch reporting. Further research into modern slavery in the fisheries sector is needed to better understand how the issue relates to overfishing and fisheries policy, as well as measures to reduce risk in these labour markets.

ForewordSexual assault is regarded as one of the most serious crimes in our society. Perpetrators can receive lengthy sentences if successfully convicted and victims are often left traumatised both physically and psychologically. In 2003 the Australian Institute of Criminology interviewed 6677 women of whom four percent reported being the victim of sexual violence in the last 12 months and 11 percent had been a victim in the past five years. Despite condemnation of this crime another Institute study of 141 sexual assault case files from five jurisdictions found that 38 per cent of all cases were withdrawn from prosecution, 33 per cent of all cases were finalised by way of a guilty plea, 29 per cent of all cases proceeded to trial, and 38 percent of cases that proceeded to trial resulted in a guilty verdict.Increasing conviction rates is a key issue for the criminal justice system; so too is a genuine concern for the welfare of victims. The research that informs this report was commissioned by the New South Wales Attorney General's Department and resulted from a direct policy question: 'would the provision of evidence by an adult sexual assault victim, if given via a television monitor rather than face-to-face in the courtroom, influence the outcome that a jury would arrive at in determining guilt or innocence?'. The criminal justice system has come under criticism for re-victimising the victim through the means by which evidence is given and the lengthy appeal process that can occur from time to time. Others however have argued that the victim's face-to-face testimony is crucial to securing successful prosecutions.It is clearly a difficult research task to attempt to provide an objective and reliable evidence base on which to test this hypothesis.A randomised experiment was designed which involved 210 people participating in 18 mock trials. These jurors were randomly assigned to a particular mode of victim testimony -face-to-face, CCTV or video -and two styles of victim presentation -neutral or emotional.The key outcome from the study was that the mode of testimony did not have a meaningful impact on the jury outcomes. Nor was there any consistent impact on the jurors' perceptions or decisions from the victim's presentation style. However the study did find that jurors' personal beliefs, the requirement to convict beyond reasonable doubt and the difficulty in understanding what 'consent' meant were factors that influenced the jurors' deliberations in determining an outcome. None of the jury panels returned a guilty verdict.This work adds to the on-going research agenda on sexual assault that the Institute has been pursuing over the past three years. Funded by the Australian Government's Office for Women, continued funding into sexual assault research was renewed in the last budget.To date the Institute has published some key pieces of research that have focused on the Non-reporting and hidden recording of sexual assault, Recidivism of sexual offenders: rates, risk factors and treatment efficacy, Prosecutorial dec...

Objectives This article explores the merits of commercially-based survey data on crime through cross-validation with established crime metrics. Methods Using unpublished data from 166 countries covering the period between 2006 and 2019, the article describes the geographical distribution across global regions and trends over time of three types of common crime, homicide, and organised crime. The article then explores possible determinants of the geographical distributions through regressing prevalence rates against indices of poverty, inequality, proportion of youth, presence of criminal opportunities (wealth and urbanisation), and governance/rule of law. Results The results show that African and Latin American countries suffer from the highest levels of various types of crime across the board, followed by countries in Asia. European, North American and Australian countries experience intermediate or relatively low levels of most types of crime. Levels of common crime have dropped or stabilized globally except in Africa where they went up. Homicides have fallen almost universally. Trends in organised crime are diverging. Conclusions Dimensions of governance emerged as powerful determinants of levels of all types of crime. Important determinants of common crime besides governance were poverty, inequality, and proportion of youth. To some extent changes in these same characteristics of countries were found to be correlated with changes in levels of crime over the past fifteen years. The article concludes with a discussion of the study’s limitations and suggestions for further research.

No abstract

No abstract