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xx | General Introduction Burglary Obtaining reliable rates of property crime, the most common of which is usu- ally referred to as theft, is especially diffi cult when relying on offi cially recorded statistics because defi nitions and enforcement practices vary enormously across nations. We have therefore included measures of victimization of individuals by burglary. These measures are derived from the International Crime Victim Sur- veys (ICVS), which are interviews or questionnaires asking samples of a popu- lation whether they have been victims of particular off enses over a particular number of years (usually the past year). In this case, the samples were households, and the survey was conducted in many countries, although limited only to urban populations . Therefore, they do not, of course, represent the country or region as a whole, though they do, perhaps in the case of burglary, represent most of the population of a given country that there are, generally, many more households in urban settings than in rural settings. These data are taken from Van Dijk’s World of Crime. Countries were ranked according to their burglary rates (number of victimizations reported per 1,000 people) using quartiles, divided into High, Me- dium, and Low, with Medium defi ned by the two middle quartiles. Corruption The ways in which crime and punishment are eventually perceived by the public and administered by the State are aff ected by the level of corruption in a particu- lar country. We have therefore included a measure of corruption, a kind of crime that is neither a violent crime nor, strictly speaking, a property crime. Rather, it is a crime against justice itself. There is also the advantage that data on per- ceived corruption in countries are much more available, thanks to the source of our data, Transparency International at http://www.transparency.org/policy_re search/surveys_indices/cpi. This Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is based on the ranking of “180 countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as deter- mined by expert assessments and opinion surveys” according to Transparency International. We have taken these rankings, added some additional countries in some cases where they were not included in the survey, and then divided them into Low, Medium, and High, using quartiles once again. Human Traffi cking This measure is taken from the U.S. Department of State three-tier listing of countries it classifi es as making a strong eff ort to control human traffi cking, making some eff ort, or making very little eff ort. The classifi cations are taken from the U.S. Department of State Traffi cking in Persons Report 2008, found at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/index.htm. The classifi cation scheme is derived from the U.S. Traffi cking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), which defi nes the minimum standards for the elimination of traffi cking. It should be noted, however, that our ratings of “High” “Medium,” and “Low” in the rates of human traffi cking are only very rough because they assume that countries that comply with the U.S. anti-traffi cking standards of enforcement will therefore have low levels of human traffi cking. This is not always true. The United States,