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University of Manchester
Department of Criminology
Home of CrimRxiv | CrimRxiv Consortium, Founding Member
The Department of Criminology at the University of Manchester (UoM) is internationally leading in new thinking about crime, victims and harm in a changing world. Their research is centered around five main areas of expertise: fraud, white collar and organised crime; prisons, punishment and policing; inequalities connected to offending; violence and its aftermath; and, drug markets, consumption and policy. They also have cross-cutting expertise on quantitative methods and digital technologies and crime, regulation and governance and criminalisation, social fairness and social justice. Their international profile is evidenced with publications in international journals, leading research collaborations, and prestigious advisory appointments to government and international bodies. At UoM, they are a co-leader of the Center for Digital Trust & Society, which focuses on barriers to and enablers of trust in digital technologies. In 2022, the Department became the new steward of CrimRxiv, in partnership with UoM’s Office for Open Research. Follow them on Twitter @CriminologyUoM.
Published: Dec 10, 2024
In most models on terrorism, interaction with other radicals is a key factor. However, systematic empirical evidence that radical ties affect behaviour is scarce. Our access to detailed police information allows us to apply Social Network Analysis (SNA) on a Dutch ...
Published: Dec 09, 2024
Motivated by recent concerns regarding links between football and illicit finance, this article analyses the ownership structures of English Premier League (EPL) football clubs from the 2023/24 season to better understand how they reflect conditions that have been identified ...
Published: Dec 02, 2024
The UK's approach to combating money laundering extends beyond traditional enforcement authorities, encompassing diverse regulated entities mandated to monitor and share intelligence on suspected laundering activities. This study examines the UK's Anti-Money Laundering (AML) ...
Published: Nov 29, 2024
The conventional understanding of resilience often portrays it as a positive outcome emerging from adverse situations. This perspective frequently shapes interventions aimed at bolstering resilience among individuals considered to be in need. Drawing upon data from a European ...
Published: Nov 25, 2024
Cybercrime is on the rise, and so is the need to systematically analyze its prevalence, distribution, causes and consequences. While official records (mainly police, prosecution and court statistics) provide important information to explore online crime, they have been ...
Published: Nov 14, 2024
This article closely reviews a selection of criminology studies on the pains of older prisoners to examine the construction of a particular type of ‘intolerable’ punishment. The term ‘intolerable’ depicts the moral line between acceptable state punitive treatments and those ...
Published: Nov 08, 2024
Timukaite, A., & Buil-Gil, D. (2024). Trust in the police and crime reporting: Reassessing assumptions in the context of violent crime in England and Wales. International Review of Victimology. https://doi.org/10.1177/02697580241296569
Published: Nov 07, 2024
Buil-Gil, D., Trajtenberg, N., & Aebi, M. F. (2024). Measuring Cyber Crime and Deviance in Surveys. In R.S. Graham, S.G. Humer, C.S. Lee & V. Nagy (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Online Deviance (pp. 44-72). Routledge.
Published: Oct 04, 2024
If and how policing affects crime has long been studied. On the relationship between police force size and crime, different authors come to different conclusions. This study examines the relationship between police resourcing, including workforce size, structure and stability ...
Published: Aug 25, 2024
There is a vast literature evaluating the empirical association between stay-at-home policies and crime during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these academic efforts have primarily focused on the effects within specific cities or regions rather than adopting a cross-national ...
Published: Jul 11, 2024
Whilst inherently lawful, shelf companies enable the generation of contrived financial structures and arrangements that can facilitate actors to organise their criminal activities and conceal, convert, or control their illicit finances or assets. A stratified market for the ...
Published: May 14, 2024
The misuse of law firm pooled client accounts has been identified as one of the primary areas of money laundering and terrorist financing risk for the legal profession. This article demonstrates the varied role that client accounts can play in money laundering, through both ...
Published: Apr 08, 2024
Contemporary criminology issues are increasingly global, cross-cultural, and multilingual. Moreover, students from different cultural and national backgrounds will need to apply data analytics in their respective contexts. Crime data used in statistical courses should reflect ...
Published: Mar 29, 2024
The number of missing child reports exceed police investigative capacity, yet some incidents are linked with harm, making effective risk assessment essential for safeguarding. Police data likely underrepresents harm to missing children due to harm being undisclosed, and ...
Published: Mar 08, 2024
The Department of Criminology sits within the School of Social Sciences and is a research-oriented department delivering excellent teaching to undergraduate and postgraduate students. We are seeking to appoint a new Lecturer in Quantitative Criminology to support core ...
Published: Mar 07, 2024
CrimRxiv, criminology’s global open access hub and repository, celebrated its one-year anniversary at the University of Manchester (UoM). Next month will mark the half-year anniversary of the CrimRxiv Consortium, a network of criminology’s leading institutions with UoM at the ...
Published: Mar 05, 2024
While victims of trafficking who commit crimes have a defense in law in England and Wales, this has not been without controversy in the courts and is increasingly threatened in practice as British government ministers heap suspicion on those formally seeking recognition as ...
Published: Feb 20, 2024
Accepted for publication in International Annals of Criminology
Published: Feb 16, 2024
Buil-Gil, D., Bui, L., Trajtenberg, N., Diviak, T., Kim, E., & Solymosi, R. (2024). Diversifying crime datasets in introductory statistical courses in criminology. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, pp. 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511253.2024.2334706
Published: Feb 13, 2024
Lord, N. (2024) ‘Accommodating Transnational Corporate Bribery Revisited: Performing Transparency in the Shadows of Negotiation’, in N. Capus and F. Hohl Zürcher (eds) Negotiated Justice in Transnational Corruption – Between Transparency and Confidentiality, Helbing Lichtenhahn.
Published: Feb 08, 2024
Oliveira, T. R., Jackson, J., de Oliveira, R. T., Piccirillo, D., & Trinkner, R. (2022). Socialization through violence: Exposure to neighborhood and police violence and the developmental trajectories of legitimacy beliefs among adolescents in São Paulo. SocArXiv.
Published: Feb 08, 2024
Davies, J., Malik, H., Jokinen, A., & Saara, H. (2023). Private and public co-operation in preventing and addressing corporate crime: the case of labour trafficking in the Finnish construction industry. Crime, Law and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-023-10110-0
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Published in M. Tzanetakis and N. South (Eds.), Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets: Reconfiguration and Continuity (pp. 141-154). Leeds: Emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-866-820231010
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Diviák T, Lord N. From text to ties: Extraction of corruption network data from deferred prosecution agreements. Data & Policy. 2023;5:e4. doi:10.1017/dap.2022.41
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Oliveira, T. R. (2021). Dynamics and Consequences of the Overpolicing-Underpolicing Paradox in Brazil's Largest City. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/89jkv
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Neis Araujo, F. (2023). Ganja and the Laws of Men: Cannabis Decriminalization and Social (In) Justice in Jamaica. Contemporary Drug Problems, 50(2), 202-216.
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Diviák, T., & Lord, N. (in press). Connecting the Corrupt: Data Sources to Study Networks of Serious Financial Crime in the United Kingdom. In L. Huey & D. Buil-Gil (Eds.), The Crime Data Handbook. Bristol: Policy Press.
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Trajtenberg, N. & Sánchez de Ribera, O. (in press). The Dark Figure of Prison Violence in Uruguay: An Exploratory Mixed-Method Study. In L. Huey & D. Buil-Gil (Eds.), The Crime Data Handbook. Bristol: Policy Press.
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Lord, N., & Levi, M. (2023). Economic crime, economic criminology, and serious crimes for economic gain: On the conceptual and disciplinary (dis)order of the object of study. Journal of Economic Criminology, 1, 100014.
Published: Feb 07, 2024
Czerwinsky, A. (2023). Misogynist incels gone mainstream: A critical review of the current directions in incel-focused research. Crime, Media, Culture, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590231196125
Published: Jan 02, 2024
Crime data is essential to the running of a safe society. But are we measuring crime in the best way? Ian Brunton-Smith, Alexandru Cernat, David Buil-Gil and Jose Pina-Sánchez explore how the current system could be improved.
Published: Jan 02, 2024
Šerý, M., Brisudová, L., Buil-Gil, D., Kimic, K., Polko, P., & Solymosi, R. (2023). The Perception of Personal Security in Urban Parks: A Comparative Analysis of Research Methods. In Dynamics of Placemaking Volume 1. Leiden: Brill.
Published: Dec 22, 2023
Training materials for short course ‘Adjustment Methods for Data Quality Problems: Missing Data, Measurement Error, and Misclassification.’
Published: Dec 11, 2023
Drug use and trading are typically social activities; however, supply through cryptomarkets can occur without any in-person social contact. People who use drugs alone may be at higher risk of experiencing harms, for example, due to lack of others who may call for emergency ...
Published: Dec 04, 2023
A central conceit to Michael Taussig’s writing, as approached herein, lies in its removal of the preposition conventionally deployed to describe ethnography, history, and other modes of “non-fictional” writing: writing about reality. What could such writing be like if it is ...
Published: Nov 22, 2023
Researchers from St Mary’s SARC and the University of Manchester are carrying out research into the long-term support needs of sexual abuse survivors. They want to learn more about what sexual abuse survivors need in the months following the assault so that services can be ...
Published: Nov 13, 2023
This briefing shares the results of research investigating why police in England and Wales close rape cases. It is part of the large-scale, UK Government funded Operation Soteria Bluestone which aims to improve police investigations of rape and other sexual offences. It is ...
Published: Nov 12, 2023
This briefing shares the results of research investigating the real scale and nature of rape reporting to and recording by the police, as well as the charge rate, in England and Wales. It is part of the large-scale, UK Government funded Operation Soteria Bluestone which aims ...
Published: Nov 05, 2023
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine received widespread international condemnation. In Slovakia, the invasion became a subject of much political discussion with large number of MPs openly advocating Russian interests. This study investigates Slovak political discourse on ...
Published: Oct 27, 2023
This article presents first-hand experience of those delivering counter fraud services, demonstrating the extent of disjointedness in responses to fraud against the National Health Service (NHS). This sample study of local counter fraud specialists working across England, ...
Published: Oct 26, 2023
CrimRxiv, criminology’s global open access hub and repository, has announced its new Director, Nicholas Lord, Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Digital Trust & Society at the University of Manchester (UoM). “It’s an honour and privilege to be CrimRxiv’s ...
Published: Oct 16, 2023
A Research Associate is required to work on the ADVANCE-D in Probation Project, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NiHR). The Greater Manchester fieldwork for the project will by directed by Professor David Gadd in the Department of Criminology, School of ...
The Drop in Worry about Crime and Its Gender Gap: Trends in England and Wales from 1998 to 2019/2020
Published: Oct 04, 2023
Using data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, this research explores trends in worry about crime and its gender gap between 1998 and 2019/20. Worry about different types of crime follows a downward trajectory, with worries about car-related crimes showing the …
Published: Oct 03, 2023
Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is recognised as a global environmental, economic, and social problem, taking place in all kinds of fisheries. Preventing it is however difficult and there is a continuous need to expand the knowledge base on how the issue can ...
Published: Sep 29, 2023
In this study, we investigated the relation between the different stages of women trafficking (i.e. recruitment, entrance, accommodation, labor, and finance) and the structure of five criminal networks involved in women trafficking in the Netherlands (Ns ranging from 6 to 15 ...
Published: Sep 29, 2023
This article presents a discussion of the emerging ethical issue of geodata privacy in geographical research. The paper highlights the importance of considering challenges to privacy when working with geographically explicit data and explores explicit ways in which ...
Published: Sep 27, 2023
Numerous corporate and state processes have long underpinned harms related to human trafficking and exploitation. A consequence of these processes has been a growing interest in how public and private sector organisations co-operate to address key challenges, including ...
Published: Sep 21, 2023
Monty Howell was the eldest son of Rastafari pioneer Leonard Howell; in this book Linda Ainouche presents his recollections of his father and memories of life in and after Pinnacle, the first Rastafarian camp. Most of the stories involve struggles by his father and other ...
Published: Sep 19, 2023
This study provides the first comprehensive introduction to exponential random graph models (ERGM) in the Czech academic literature. In it we apply ERGM to a network of 68 organisations involved in the Czech coal policy subsystem. First, we summarise the major limitations of ...
Published: Sep 08, 2023
It is well known that police recorded crime data is susceptible to substantial measurement error. However, despite its limitations, police data is widely used in regression models exploring the causes and effects of crime, which can lead to different types of bias. Here, we ...
Published: Sep 01, 2023
This article has two main objectives. First, to interrogate the concept and/or conception of ‘economic crime’ (framed as a singular thing). We argue that current policy, and subsequently, social scientific (or criminological more specifically) framings, tend to arbitrarily ...
Published: Aug 16, 2023
This chapter explores the disruptive potential of the Internet to transform illicit drug markets while also challenging stereotypical depictions and superficial understandings of supply and demand. It argues that the digital transformation of illicit drug markets combines, on ...
Published: Aug 16, 2023
This chapter examines how darknet drug marketplaces operate within platform capitalism. While capitalist power relations remain underexplored in research on digital drug markets, the analysis shows that the basic foundation of cryptomarkets relies on the infrastructure of ...
Published: Jun 28, 2023
Purpose: To assess the quality of police recorded crime and survey estimates of crime in a unified framework that does not treat either as a ‘gold standard’. Understanding the quality of crime estimates has implications for all empirical studies assessing the geographic ...
Published: Mar 24, 2023
It is widely known that police recorded crime data provides only a partial picture of the true extent of crimes, with surveys identifying a large number of ‘hidden’ victims. Often referred to as the dark figure of crime, this gap between police records and ‘true’ level of ...
Published: Mar 24, 2023
Criminal networks tend to recover after a disruption, and this recovery may trigger negative unintended consequences by strengthening network cohesion. This study uses a real-world street gang network as a basis for simulating the effect of disruption and subsequent recovery ...
Published: Feb 27, 2023
Missing person investigations involve the collection of information to ensure the person is located as fast as possible, minimising their exposure to harms. Social media is a valuable source of information in police investigations both to learn about the missing person, and ...
Published: Feb 17, 2023
This article describes the harms caused by the criminalization of cannabis in Jamaica and the outcomes of the decriminalization and legalization processes that started in 2015. It argues that the current framework does not promote social justice for actors historically ...
Published: Feb 07, 2023
This paper considers the pains of life-sentence imprisonment through the novel vantage point of old age understood as a process. Our prison populations are getting older and the use of life sentences is dramatically increasing. Yet, research, campaigning, law and policy have ...
Published: Jan 06, 2023
Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger system that allows multiple parties to record and verify transactions in a secure and transparent manner. However, blockchain networks are vulnerable to anomalies and frauds that can have serious consequences for the integrity and ...
Published: Jan 01, 2023
Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are a legal tool for the nontrial resolution of cases of corruption. Each DPA is accompanied by a Statement of Facts that provides detailed and publicly available textual records of the given cases, including summarized evidence of who ...
Published: Dec 21, 2022
Much British crime and immigration policy over the last decade has been justified as a response to the problem of modern slavery perpetrated by ‘evil’ foreign national organised criminals profiting from the exploitation of vulnerable people. Social scientists, by contrast, ...
Published: Oct 27, 2022
This brief article illustrates the features of ScriptNet, a functional visualization software tool which implements elements of the “script-network” method (Lord et al., 2020). The toolkit is developed as a standard graphical user interface (GUI) found in the Windows ...
Published: Sep 12, 2022
Police-recorded crimes are used by police forces to document community differences in crime and design spatially targeted strategies. Nevertheless, crimes known to police are affected by selection biases driven by underreporting. This paper presents a simulation study to ...
Published: Aug 05, 2022
Nation-states face regulatory and enforcement dilemmas when dealing with corporations operating in international commerce that are implicated in the bribery of foreign public officials. As part of the regulatory landscape, non-trial resolutions, and Deferred Prosecution ...
Published: Jul 07, 2022
This article focuses on the important and persistent phenomenon of women killed by their sons. We argue that parricide (the killing of parents) is a gendered form of violence.
Published: Jun 06, 2022
Dieser Beitrag behandelt die Einbettung von digitalen Plattformen für die Distribution von illegalisierten Drogen in eine den Zeitgeist prägende kapitalistische Spielart, den Plattform-Kapitalismus. Diese Drogen-Plattformen, welche auch als Kryptomärkte bezeichnet werden, ...
Published: Jun 03, 2022
This article examines police data to assess the duration for which different groups of victims of modern slavery endured exploitation and the length of time after their exploitation concluded before it was officially recorded. The article proposes that these measures of ...
Published: May 06, 2022
Longitudinal studies of criminal networks are rare yet necessary to assess the adaptation and recovery of criminal networks after disruptions. We study the structural and individual effects of law enforcement disruption on criminal networks using longitudinal data on two ...
Published: Apr 25, 2022
Building on empirical data from Finnish enforcement agencies, we reflect on the challenges of the administrative approach to crime prevention. At the operational level, we identify explicit legal and implicit extra-legal limitations for using the administrative approach, that ...
Published: Mar 28, 2022
This paper aims to estimate the prevalence of client-perpetrated sexual and physical violence against female sex workers (FSW) in Bogotá, and to understand what structural and environmental factors are associated with such victimisation. The project looked at secondary data ...
Published: Mar 03, 2022
Background. The pricing of illicit drugs is typically approached within the risks and prices framework. Recent sociological and economic studies of prices in online drug markets have stressed the centrality of reputation for price formation. In this paper, we propose an ...
Published: Feb 09, 2022
An exploratory study analysing the networks of corporate and public sector bribery.
Published: Oct 23, 2021
The aim of this article is to investigate the nature of information sharing via Twitter by police officers. We examine the content of Tweets in urban and rural contexts using a sample of 20 police-related Twitter accounts, comparing official and personal accounts active in ...
Published: Sep 14, 2021
Following major criminal cases in the food system, such as the Horsemeat and fipronil egg scandals, the phenomenon of food fraud has emerged as a priority concern for supranational (e.g. European Union) and domestic policymakers and regulatory authorities. Alongside this, ...
Published: Aug 11, 2021
Article published in Crime Science: Buil-Gil, D., Zeng, Y. & Kemp, S. Offline crime bounces back to pre-COVID levels, cyber stays high: interrupted time-series analysis in Northern Ireland. Crime Sci 10, 26 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-021-00162-9
Published: Jul 18, 2021
The unprecedented changes in routine activities brought about by COVID-19 and the associated lockdown measures contributed to a reduction in opportunities for predatory crimes in outdoor physical spaces, while people spent more time connected to the internet, and ...
Published: Jul 08, 2021
We explore young people’s experiences and perceptions of knife crime, and we compare these to the understanding of police experts, to explore the perceptions shaping trust in the police and policing. We carry out an experience sampling survey deployed using a mobile ...
Published: Jun 24, 2021
Describing young people who offend or who are more likely to offend as vulnerable or having vulnerability seems commonplace in the literature as of late. Although the use of vulnerability in the research literature on youth crime appears widespread, its meaning, nonetheless, ...
Published: Jun 12, 2021
After decades of rising homicide rates in the late 20th century, much of the Western world witnessed a decline in homicide from the early-mid-1990s. In England and Wales, homicide rates defied this trend and continued to rise for a further decade, peaking in 2004 before ...
Published: Jun 06, 2021
This GDPO Policy Brief is intended to inform policy-makers, practitioners, and other actors of the latest developments – and likely future direction – of Drug Cryptomarkets (DCM). It draws together several complementary active research strands to provide a timely trend ...
Published: Feb 25, 2021
Findings are based on 2,621 responses to Release’s ‘Coronavirus Drug Purchases Impact Survey’ received between the 9th April 2020 and the 17th September 2020 (inclusive). Responses capture drug purchases made in anticipation of and during the first UK national lockdown, as ...
Published: Feb 16, 2021
Embargoed until 16 August 2022
Published: Feb 05, 2021
Worry about COVID-19 is a central topic of research into the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a new way of measuring worry about catching COVID-19 that distinguishes between worry as a negative experience that damages ...
Published: Feb 01, 2021
The concept of centrality and centrality measures are well-known and frequently used in social network analysis. They are also implemented in numerous software packages. However, that does not mean that it is easy to apply them correctly. This paper aims to introduce the most ...
Published: Dec 25, 2020
This article presents a framework for analysing, assessing and systematising the varying financial aspects of human trafficking. We analysed 378 human trafficking cases, scrutinising police case file data to determine patterns and scenarios of associated financial aspects and ...
Published: Dec 08, 2020
Undertaking qualitative dyad or couple interviews involving intimate partner abuse and substance use presents considerable ethical, safeguarding, and theoretical challenges throughout the research process from recruitment to conducting interviews and analysis. These ...
Published: Dec 01, 2020
The crime gender gap is the difference between the levels of participation of men and women in crime, with men responsible for more crime than women. Recent evidence suggests that the crime gender gap is closing, both in crime in general and in organized crime. However, ...
Published: Nov 23, 2020
We explored heterogeneity (subgroups) amongst victims and suspects of modern slavery offences using a cross-sectional extract of police data from a large metropolitan area in the UK with details of 540 victims and 380 suspects (reported to the police between April 2015 and ...
Published: Nov 19, 2020
Rhetoric is a way to explain policy problem framing by recognising the practical necessity to persuade audiences in contextual situations. Modern slavery and human trafficking is a complex and emotive problem, simplified through rhetorical demands to motivate an audience of ...
Published: Nov 19, 2020
Examining the impact of drug criminalisation on a previously overlooked demographic, this book argues that women are disproportionately affected by a flawed policy approach.
Encountering authority and avoiding trouble: Young migrant men’s narratives of negotiation in Europe
Published: May 23, 2020
Drawing on data from seven European countries (Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom), this article seeks to identify how young migrant men engage with authority and avoid conflict against a backdrop of increasing hostility towards ...
Published: Apr 20, 2020
The construction and labelling of groups of young people as ‘risky’ triggers a multifaceted and dynamic social process of stigma that frequently results in reduced life chances and limited opportunities for self-development. Drawing on case-study data from four European ...
Published: Apr 06, 2020
Collaboration between members of different criminal groups is an important feature of crime that is considered organised, as it allows criminals to access resources and skills in order to exploit illicit economic opportunities. Collaboration across criminal groups is also ...
Published: Dec 19, 2019
This article offers a new theory of how extreme forms of imprisonment become normalized, using the development of life without parole (LWOP) in the Californian death penalty context over 40 years as an example. Normalization here refers to a punishment’s acceptability to the ...
