Shaun McLaws
Shaun McLaws is currently in his final year for his PhD at Deakin University, studying co-offending as a contemporary driver in recent changes in youth offending patterns. The project is examining the impact of co-offending on youth offending from a network perspective.
Research interests include young people and crime from a developmental and life-course perspective including co-offending, youth offending patterns, and diversion.
Session
Recently, there has been growing concern about youth crime and its impact, both in Australia and internationally. Across Australian jurisdictions there has been an observed incline in violent and serious offences committed by young people (e.g., Armytage, 2017; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024). Despite this, the key drivers behind these changes in youth offending patterns remain poorly understood. Increasingly, youth crime is being characterised as a network phenomenon (Shepherd & Spivak, 2020), with co-offending emerging as a potential driver in changes in violent offending patterns. Research on co-offending and group-based violence has grown considerably, yet little is known about how social embeddedness, the extent to which individuals are situated within co-offending networks shapes the formation of violent incidents.
This study examined youth co-offending from a two-mode (actor-event) network approach, examining structural embeddedness (position within the network) as a key dimension of social embeddedness. Using relational hyperevent models, observed violent co-offending groups were compared against size-matched counterfactual groups drawn from ten years (2015–2024) of administrative police records for young people in two urban Queensland districts. RHEM are well suited to analysing multi-actor events such as co-offending because they preserve the structure of co-offending groups, including group size, event timing, and actor interdependencies. Importantly, this avoids information loss that occurs in traditional social network analyses, which typically treat multi-actor events as a collection of separate dyads (Lerner et al., 2019).
Findings revealed that structural embeddedness significantly predicted the formation of violent co-offending events, with violence concentrating among connected youth and among groups of structurally similar peers. The findings will help inform and strengthen criminal justice responses to youth co-offending by identifying key network factors that contribute to violent offending patterns. Expanding the knowledge base on co-offending can help inform strategies to disrupt the formation of antisocial groups and networks, to divert individuals away from crime, and to reduce the likelihood of young people becoming embedded in co-offending groups, and progressing to adult or persistent violent offending.
References
Armytage, P. (2017). Youth Justice Review and Strategy: Meeting needs and reducing offending. Department of Justice and Community Safety. https://apo.org.au/node/101051
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2024). Recorded Crime—Offenders: Statistics about offenders proceeded against by police, including demographic, most serious offence, and family and domestic violence information. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/recorded-crime-offenders/latest-release#key-statistics
Lerner, J., Tranmer, M., Mowbray, J., & Hancean, M. G. (2019). REM beyond dyads: relational hyperevent models for multi-actor interaction networks. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1912.07403
Shepherd, S. M., & Spivak, B. L. (2020). Estimating the extent and nature of offending by Sudanese-born individuals in Victoria. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 53(3), 352–368.