By The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

The third edition of the World Wildlife Crime Report probes recent trends in the illicit trafficking of protected species of wild fauna and flora and provides a broad assessment of current knowledge about the causes and implications of associated crime at a global level. As was the case for the first two editions published in 2016 and 2020, research carried out for this report included quantitative assessment of global wildlife trafficking and a series of in-depth case studies. An additional emphasis for this edition is on systematic analysis of wildlife crime harms and impacts, factors driving crime trends and the evidence for what remedial interventions work best.

The report concludes that wildlife trafficking persists worldwide despite two decades of concerted action at international and national levels. There are signs of progress in reducing the impacts of trafficking for some iconic species, elephants and rhinoceros, for which a combination of efforts from both the demand and supply side have yielded positive outcomes. However, UNODC’s assessment of available evidence gives no confidence that wildlife trafficking overall is being substantially reduced.

The global scope and scale of wildlife crime remain substantial with seizures during 2015–2021 indicating an illegal trade in 162 countries and territories affecting around 4,000 plant and animal species. Beyond the immediate conservation threat to target species, population reductions caused by wildlife trafficking can play a role in triggering ecosystem-level impacts by disturbing interdependencies between different species and undermining related functions and processes, including those important to climate change resilience and mitigation. Wildlife crime also threatens the socioeconomic benefits people derive from nature, whether as a source of income, employment, food, medicine or other values. It further corrodes good governance and the rule of law through corruption, money-laundering and illicit financial flows.

The report notes that transnational organized crime groups are active in some illicit wildlife markets, where they exploit inconsistencies and weaknesses in regulation and enforcement, adapting their methods and routes continuously to evade detection and prosecution. Corruption also plays a key role in undermining regulation and enforcement actions against wildlife trade.

The 2024 World Wildlife Crime Report tracks all these issues, trends and more

Vienna: UNODC, 2024. 169p.

By  Susan Olzak

Scholars document that attitudes toward guns and gun policy reflect deeply entrenched cultures that overlap with ideological affiliations and party politics. Does exposure to dramatic events such as school shootings and protests regarding gun control affect these patterns? I first argue that school shootings are significant triggering events that will become associated with attitudes favoring gun restrictions. The second argument holds that rising protests by one’s opponent can be transformed into mobilizing opportunity by a focal group. To examine these ideas, I combine information from a national exit poll data on respondents’ attitudes on gun policy with state-level information on the counts of recent school shootings, gun-policy protest, existing laws restricting gun use, and membership in the National Rifle Association. To minimize bias, the analysis of public opinion applies Coarsened Exact Matching techniques followed by analysis using mixed-level logit. The second analysis uses data on gun control protests, school shootings, and NRA memberships in states over time. Results show that conservatives (but not liberals) exposed to more school shootings favor more restrictive gun policies. The second, longitudinal analysis found that there is a significant interaction effect between increases in school shootings and gun control protests that diminishes NRA memberships significantly.

Unpublished paper. 2022. 49p.

By The International Crisis Group 

Over half a century on from the declaration of a “war on drugs”, Latin America is struggling to manage the eruption of violence tied to the narcotics trade. Though drugrelated organised crime has brought notorious peaks of violence in the past, above all in Colombia and Mexico, never has it spread so wide, and rarely has it penetrated so deeply into states and communities. Criminal groups have splintered, multiplied and diversified, adding lethal synthetics like fentanyl to the traditional plant-based supply of marijuana, cocaine and heroin, as well as moving into new rackets like extortion. Where communities are poor and unprotected, criminal groups act as employers and overlords; where state officials are present, they coerce and corrupt them. With Washington pushing for a fresh military-led crackdown on drug cartels, perhaps involving U.S. forces, Latin American leaders face difficult decisions. Despite the pressure to comply, experience suggests that a balance of improved policing, alternative livelihoods, gun control and, under specific conditions, negotiations would be more effective in reducing violence. The map of the drug trade in Latin America has been transformed in the decades since supply routes from the Andes to the U.S. first emerged. Demand for narcotics outside the region remains at record highs, with newer markets booming – particularly for cocaine in Europe and fentanyl in the U.S. At the same time, waves of U.S.- backed law enforcement, based on capture and extradition of crime bosses (known as kingpins), drug seizures and forced eradication have revolutionised the supply chain. Although Colombia and Mexico remain at the heart of the drug business, a main route to the U.S. and Europe runs down the Pacific, passing through countries that were largely untouched by illicit trafficking such as Costa Rica and Ecuador. Each of these has seen rates of violence rise sharply; in 2024, Ecuador was South America’s most violent nation. Across the region, surges of bloodshed have marked the new hubs of a fast-shifting, hyper-violent drug trade. Understanding how this rolling crime wave came about is fundamental to arresting it. Drug-related organised crime has adapted to the threat posed by law enforcement by becoming more flexible and resilient. In place of hierarchical syndicates that could be dismantled once their leaders were identified, the trade increasingly functions through networks of providers who subcontract each step of the route to lower tiers of operators. High-level financiers engage sophisticated international traffickers, who oversee drug exports to user markets. These in turn partner with national and local crime groups to meet the orders. National groups manage production or ensure safe passage of the drug along a particular trafficking corridor. At the local level, urban gangs are contracted by larger criminal allies for small-scale logistical services like smuggling drugs through ports. All the layers of these networks have learned that capturing state officials is a business asset. Using a mix of threats and payoffs, they target police officers, judges, prosecutors and politicians who can ensure that business runs smoothly, without the risk of arrest or seizure of shipments. Likewise, prisons in some of Latin America’s roughest settings are run by inmates, who manage their criminal enterprises behind bars and carry out vendettas against rivals inside and outside.

Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2025. 51p.

By Jonathan Lusthaus

Cybercrime is not a solely technical subject but one that involves human offenders who are susceptible to social scientific study. Yet, despite calls for cybercrime research to be mainstreamed, the topic remains a niche area within legal studies and the social sciences. Drawing on the most significant findings over recent years, this review aims to make the subject more accessible to a wide range of scholars by softening some of the perceived boundaries between conceptions of cybercrime and conventional crime. It examines these key themes in the literature: definitions and categories of cybercrime, cybercrime marketplaces, the governance of cybercrime, the importance of “place” within the world of cybercrime, cybercriminal networks, a discussion of what is new or old about cybercrime, and how we should define the concept going forward. The empirical literature on these themes suggests a simple definition is most appropriate: Cybercrime is crime that uses digital technology in a significant way.

Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Vol. 20 (2024), pp. 369–385

By Shawn Davies, Garoun Engström, Therése Pettersson, and Magnus Öberg

This article examines trends in organized violence based on new data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). In 2023, fatalities from organized violence decreased for the first time since the rapid increase observed in 2020, dropping from 310,000 in 2022 to 154,000 in 2023. Despite this decline, these figures represent some of the highest fatality rates recorded since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, surpassed only by those of 2022 and 2021. The decrease was primarily attributed to the end of the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which accounted for about 60% of battle-related deaths in both 2022 and 2021. Despite this positive development, the number of active state-based armed conflicts increased by three in 2023, reaching the highest level ever recorded by the UCDP, totaling 59. Non- state conflicts and one-sided violence decreased in 2023 when compared to 2022, evident in both the reduction of the active conflicts/actors and the decrease in fatalities attributed to these forms of violence. However, despite this overall decrease, fatalities resulting from non-state conflicts remained at historically high levels in 2023. Analysis of non-state conflict data spanning the past decade reveals that it comprises the ten most violent years on record. Organized crime groups have predominantly fueled this escalation. Unlike rebel groups, organized crime groups typically lack political goals and are primarily motivated by economic gain. Conflicts between these groups tend to intensify around drug smuggling routes and in urban areas, driven by shifts in alliances and leadership dynamics among the actors.

Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 61(4), 2024, 673­ –693 pages

By Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Three categories of organised groups that exploit advances in information and communications technologies (ICT) to infringe legal and regulatory controls: (1) traditional organised criminal groups which make use of ICT to enhance their terrestrial criminal activities; (2) organised cybercriminal groups which operate exclusively online; and (3) organised groups of ideologically and politically motivated individuals who make use of ICT to facilitate their criminal conduct are described in this article. The need for law enforcement to have in-depth knowledge of computer forensic principles, guidelines, procedures, tools, and techniques, as well as anti-forensic tools and techniques will become more pronounced with the increased likelihood of digital content being a source of disputes or forming part of underlying evidence to support or refute a dispute in judicial proceedings. There is also a need for new strategies of response and further research on analysing organised criminal activities in cyberspace.

Springer Science + Business Media, LLC, 2008, 26p.

By Anita Lavorgna, and Anna Sergi

This paper, based on discourse analysis of policy documents, departs from a critique of the juxtaposition of the terms “serious” and “organised” in policies against organised crime in the UK. The conceptualisation of organised crime as national security threat supports our hypothesis that a similar critique can be applied to the emerging narrative of cyber-organised crime in the country. We argue that, whereby organised crime has become essentially “serious” as consequence of its characterisation as a national security threat, cyber crime is becoming “organised” in the policy narrative because of its seriousness. The seriousness and organisation of cyber crime justifies its inclusion within the national security agenda, thus accessing the procedural benefits of criminal intelligence assigned to national security threats. The implications associated to the evolution of such narratives in policy-making need to be assessed while policies are still developing.

International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 2016, 18p.

By Daniel Tolstrup, Sarah T. Roberts, Ruth Deya, George Wanje, Juma Shafi, Jocelyn R. James, Geetanjali Chander, R. Scott McClelland, Susan M. Graham

Aim

Unhealthy alcohol use is often correlated with experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). We investigated how different types of IPV (sexual, physical, emotional, and financial) were associated with unhealthy alcohol use among women engaged in sex work in Mombasa, Kenya.

Methods

This cross-sectional study included 283 HIV-negative women who engaged in sex work recruited from an ongoing cohort study. Modified Poisson analysis was used to assess associations between recent (≤ 12 months) or past (> 12 months) experiences of sexual, physical, emotional, or financial IPV and unhealthy alcohol use defined as an Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test score ≥ 8.

Results

Among 283 participants, 34.6 % had unhealthy alcohol use. Physical (62.5 %), emotional (60.4 %), and financial (66.4 %) IPV occurred more frequently than sexual IPV (43.8 %). Adjusted risk ratios (ARR) for relationships between physical and financial IPV and unhealthy alcohol use were elevated but not statistically significant. Compared to participants who had not experienced sexual IPV, those who had experienced recent or past sexual IPV had an increased risk of unhealthy alcohol use (ARR 1.56, 95 % confidence interval [1.09, 2.23] and ARR 1.48, 95 % confidence interval [0.97, 2.25], respectively).

Conclusion

Sexual IPV was associated with unhealthy alcohol use among Kenyan women who engage in sex work. Physical, emotional, and financial IPV were also highly prevalent in the study population, though not associated with unhealthy alcohol use. These findings affirm the potential benefit of providing integrated IPV and alcohol treatment services focused on recovery after experiences of IPV for this vulnerable population.

Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, Volume 14, March 2025, 7p.

By Cintya Lanchimba, Juan Pablo Díaz-Sánchez and Franklin Velasco

Introduction: This econometric analysis investigates the nexus between household factors and domestic violence. By considering diverse variables encompassing mood, depression, health consciousness, social media engagement, household chores, density, and religious affiliation, the study aims to comprehend the underlying dynamics influencing domestic violence. Methods: Employing econometric techniques, this study examined a range of household-related variables for their potential associations with levels of violence within households. Data on mood, depression, health consciousness, social media usage, household chores, density, and religious affiliation were collected and subjected to rigorous statistical analysis. Results: The findings of this study unveil notable relationships between the aforementioned variables and levels of violence within households. Positive mood emerges as a mitigating factor, displaying a negative correlation with violence. Conversely, depression positively correlates with violence, indicating an elevated propensity for conflict. Increased health consciousness is linked with diminished violence, while engagement with social media demonstrates a moderating influence. Reduction in the time allocated to household chores corresponds with lower violence levels. Household density, however, exhibits a positive association with violence. The effects of religious affiliation on violence manifest diversely, contingent upon household position and gender. Discussion: The outcomes of this research offer critical insights for policymakers and practitioners working on formulating strategies for preventing and intervening in instances of domestic violence. The findings emphasize the importance of considering various household factors when designing effective interventions. Strategies to bolster positive mood, alleviate depression, encourage health consciousness, and regulate social media use could potentially contribute to reducing domestic violence. Additionally, the nuanced role of religious affiliation underscores the need for tailored approaches based on household dynamics, positioning, and gender.

Front. Psychiatry, 2023, 13p.

By Ruggero Scaturro | Giorgio Fruscione

In the Western Balkans, religious radicalization gained international attention in the early 2010s, with around 1 000 people travelling to Syria and Iraq to join jihadist groups between 2012 and 2016. The roots of this radicalization trace back to the Yugoslav wars, the presence of mujahideen networks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Islamist charities spreading Salafi jihadism in the 1990s.

However, not all fighters from the Western Balkans are religiously motivated. Between 2014 and 2021, around 300 people fought in eastern Ukraine, mainly for political reasons, with Serbia being a major source of combatants supporting pro-Russian separatists. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this trend has resurged, with more individuals reportedly joining mercenary units like the Wagner Group.

Instability in the Western Balkans has also fuelled the spread of organized crime beyond the region, first across Europe and later to other continents. In the 1990s, the Yugo Mafia gained significant media attention in Northern Europe. Meanwhile, violent extremists from the Western Balkans maintain transnational connections through diaspora networks and using online platforms.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2025. 45p.

By The Australian Law Reform Commission

Sexual violence is one of the most common and serious harms confronting Australia today. When it comes to sexual violence and the justice system there are significant challenges. 9 out of 10 women who have experienced sexual violence do not report to the police. Where there is engagement with the justice system, between 75–85% of reports to police do not proceed to charge. Even fewer reports proceed to court. Once in court, many people report experiencing the justice system as re-traumatising.

This report examines a range of issues with the aim of strengthening and harmonising sexual assault and consent laws in Australia and considers ways to promote just outcomes for people who have experienced sexual violence, including minimising retraumatisation.

The report's 64 recommendations seek to ensure that more people who have experienced sexual violence can access the justice system, meaningfully engage with it and reach a just outcome.

Key findings

Under-engagement with the justice system to be the most significant problem with the justice system’s response to sexual violence.

The justice system is failing to meet the twin goals of access to justice and accountability: it is not supporting those who have experienced sexual violence to engage with the justice system, nor holding those who use sexual violence to account.

Key recommendations

The Australian Government, together with state and territory governments, should fund relevant organisations (including sexual violence services, community legal centres, Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, Legal Aid Commissions, and participating legal firms) to provide independent legal services, justice system navigators, and safe places to disclose.

The Australian Government should commission a national inquiry to address the impact of factors such as mandatory sentencing provisions, sentencing discount regimes, and consequences following conviction (such as sex offender registration) on sexual offence matters proceeding to trial rather than resolving via guilty pleas, and measures that may promote early resolution.

The National Judicial College of Australia should be funded to manage and staff an ongoing research team and locate a member of the research team in each of the trial courts to coordinate the building of a shared evidence base.

Flinders Lane, VIC: Australian Law Reform Commission 2025. 72p.

By The World Economic Forum

In a complex cyberspace characterized by geopolitical uncertainties, widening cyber inequity and sophisticated cyberthreats, leaders must adopt a security-first mindset. While the 2024 edition of the Global Cybersecurity Outlook highlighted the growing inequity in cyberspace, this year’s report shines a light on the increasing complexity of the cyber landscape, which has profound and far-reaching implications for organizations and nations. This complexity is driven by a series of compounding factors: – Escalating geopolitical tensions are contributing to a more uncertain environment. – Increased integration of and dependence on more complex supply chains is leading to a more opaque and unpredictable risk landscape. – The rapid adoption of emerging technologies is contributing to new vulnerabilities as cybercriminals harness them effectively to achieve greater sophistication and scale. – Simultaneously, the proliferation of regulatory requirements around the world is adding a significant compliance burden for organizations. All of these challenges are exacerbated by a widening skills gap, making it extremely challenging to manage cyber risks effectively.

Geneva, SWIT: World Economic Forum , 2025. 49p.

By Dean J. Connolly, Santino Coduri-Fulford c, Katherine Macdonald , Gail GilchristLuke Muschialli

Sexualised drug use (SDU) is a highly prevalent phenomenon of increasing public health significance in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM). This prospectively registered PRISMA-ScR-adherent systematic scoping review examines the current state of knowledge surrounding violence amongst MSM in the context of SDU. A broad search was conducted across four databases, with no restrictions. Studies citing or cited by all database-identified records retained for full-text review were retrieved and screened. Three journals were hand searched across the past five years, and three searches were conducted on Google Scholar. In addition, 13 key opinion leaders were contacted via email to request any additional published or unpublished data. The twentyeight studies included in the final synthesis reported mostly qualitative data from geographically diverse nonrepresentative samples, predominantly relating to sexual violence with other typologies seldom investigated or reported. Although quantitative data were limited, sexual violence appeared common in this context and was directly associated with impaired mental health and suicidality. Some participants reported first- or second-hand accounts of non-consensual administration of incapacitating doses of GHB/GBL to men who were subsequently raped. This was frequently perpetrated by men whose age, status, or financial privilege afforded them power over their victims. While reports from some participants suggested context-specific blurring of the lines of consent, a few quotes demonstrated a dearth of knowledge surrounding the centrality of consent in lawful sex. Given the historical denigration of MSM, any efforts to further investigate or address this issue must be community-led.

International Journal of Drug Policy

Volume 136, February 2025, 104706

By Daniel Birks, Elizabeth R. Groff, and Nick Malleson

An agent-based model is a form of complex systems model that is capable of simulating how the micro-level behavior of individual system entities contributes to macro-level system outcomes. Researchers draw on theory and evidence to identify the key elements of a given system and specify behaviors of agents that simulate the individual entities of that system—be they cells, animals, or people. The model is then used to run simulations in which agents interact with one another and the resulting outcomes are observed. These models enable researchers to explore proposed causal explanations of real-world outcomes, experiment with the impacts that potential interventions might have on system behavior, or generate counterfactual scenarios against which real-world events can be compared. In this review, we discuss the application of agent-based modeling within the field of criminology as well as key challenges and future directions for research.

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 8:75-95 January 2025)

By Jack Katz and Nahuel Roldán

Criminology is haunted by state-structured biases. We discuss five. (a) With the spatial boundaries and the binary deontology they use to count crime, governments draw researchers into ecological fog and sometimes fallacy. (b) All legal systems encourage criminologists to promote untenable implications of socially stratified criminality. (c) To degrees that vary by time and place, the scope of criminological research is compromised by methodological nationalism. (d) State agencies use chronologies that repeatedly draw researchers away from examining the nonlinear temporalities that shape variations in criminal behavior. (e) State agencies produce data that facilitate explaining the why of crime, but scientific naturalism would first work out what is to be explained. We recommend a criminology that begins by describing causal contingencies in social life independent of governments’ labeling of crime.

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 8:53-73 , January 2025

By John Hagan

My interest in criminology grew as the Vietnam War escalated. I applied to two Canadian graduate schools and flipped a coin. The coin recommended the University of Toronto, but I chose the University of Alberta, which had a stronger criminology program. I wrote a dissertation about criminal sentencing, which led to an Assistant Professorship at the University of Toronto. Dean Robert Pritchard of Toronto’s Law School encouraged my work and later successfully nominated me for a Distinguished University Professorship. My interests continued to grow in international criminal law. A MacArthur Distinguished Professorship at Chicago’s Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation facilitated my research at the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. I followed this by studying the crime of genocide in Sudan and later the trial of Chicago’s Detective Jon Burge. Burge oversaw the torture of more than 100 Black men on Chicago’s South Side. US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuted Burge when Illinois prosecutors would not. Despite many good things about Chicago, the periodic corruption of the government and police was not among them.

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 8:1-23 . January 2025

By Andrés Aldana, Hernán Larralde & Maximino Aldana

Among all types of corruption, police corruption is probably the one that most directly hurts society, as those trusted with protecting the people either side with the criminals that victimize the citizens, or are themselves, criminals. However, both corruption and its effects are very difficult to measure quantitatively other than by perception surveys, but the perception that citizens have of this phenomenon may be different from reality. Using a simple agent-based model, we analyze the effect on crime rates as a result of both corruption and the perception of corruption within law-enforcement corporations. Our results show a phase transition in which crime can propagate across the population even when the majority of police officers are honest. We find that one of the parameters that strongly controls crime incidence is the probability that regular citizens become criminals. In contrast, other actions, such as arresting crime lords, or the amount of crime-associated money that is confiscated, have little impact on the long-term crime incidence. Our results suggest that in addition to combating corruption within law-enforcement institutions, to further reduce the incidence of crime, policymakers should strive to restore confidence in these institutions and the justice system.

By Laura R. Blume

Why do drug traffickers sometimes decide to use violence, but other times demonstrate restraint? Building on recent work on the politics of drug violence, this article explores how Central American drug trafficking organizations’ strategies impact their use of violence. I argue that three inter-related political factors—corruption, electoral competition, and the politicization of the security apparatus—collectively determine the type of relationship between traffickers and the state that will emerge. That relationship, in turn, determines the primary strategy used by traffickers in that country. Drawing on over two years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in key transshipment points along the Caribbean coast of Central America, I show how co-optation strategies in Honduras have resulted in high levels of violence, evasion strategies in Costa Rica have produced moderate levels of violence, and collusion strategies in Nicaragua have generated the lowest levels of drug-related violence.

Comparative Political Studies,Volume 55, Issue 8, July 2022, Pages 1366-1402

By Ingrid Diane Johnson

Purpose: How victims of violence against women (VAW) label their experiences and selves can be important for help-seeking, but descriptive research on the prevalence of experience- and self-labels among VAW victims is limited. This study sought to fll some of the gaps in this quantitative literature using new measurement tools. Method: The current study used quantitative survey data from a weighted sample of 1694 community-based women in Alaska who had experienced VAW (determined using behaviorally specific items) to measure the prevalence of a variety of labels these victims could apply to their experiences and selves. Results Generally, victims of specific forms of violence had minimal agreement on the terms they used to label their experiences. The most commonly endorsed label was 28.5% of those who had experienced alcohol or drug involved sexual assault applying the label rape to their experiences. Across all victims, the most commonly endorsed self-label was survivor, with one-quarter to one-third endorsing this label, depending on the subsample. Roughly one-tenth used the self-label victim across all subsamples. Conclusion: VAW service providers should consider labels used to promote services and how to increase awareness about which behaviors constitute VAW; policymakers should improve the accessibility of healthcare so that labeling oneself or one’s experiences in a certain way is not a prerequisite of help-seeking; and researchers should continue exploring how to measure experience- and self-labels with minimal priming of participants and greater specificity to the actual experiences with violence.

Journal of Family Violence (2024) 39:421–433

By Reanna Sanchez

The goal of this process evaluation was to determine how closely the RRC was following evidence-based practices for reentry and to determine how successful the RRC has been transitioning individuals from the jail to the community. To evaluate the effectiveness of the RRC, we (1) conducted a survey of county staff involved in the reentry process (n = 25) to better understand how staff perceive the reentry planning process and the RRC, (2) conducted observations of the intake and screening process at the MDC, and (3) reviewed client records for all inmates who passed through the RRC between 2018 and 2022. We found that there were challenges associated with how the RRC screened, assessed, and targeted individuals for intervention related to a lack of standardization across process components. Surveys collected from staff members provided insight into challenges related to reentry, such as the need for a single case plan to follow the individual through jail and into the community. Finally, analysis of the client-level data illustrated the services and needs of clients. While many individuals (n = 9,985) completed risk needs assessments (RNAs), the number of individuals that completed transition plans (TPs) is far less (n = 2,785). Due to the nature of the different challenges of the current process in place, determining the impact of the RRC on recidivism reduction remains complicated.

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, Center for Applied Research & Analysis, 2023. 40p.