A graduate of the University of Western Australia (Phd) and University of Cambridge (M.Phil) and formerly with the Department of Corrective Services and Health Service in Western Australia. Appointed Senior Fellow, Crime Research Centre at the University of Western Australia in 1990 he helped establish sound reporting of criminal justice statistical data for Western Australia. In 1994 he took up a post as lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong where he was secretary and later Chair of the Hong Kong Society of Criminology. In 2005 he left Hong Kong to take a post at the QUT as Head of School of Justice, followed by visiting Professor Griffith University in 2008. In 2009 he was appointed Professor at the Australian National University Regulatory Institutions Network, Fellow of the Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies and Chief Investigator and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Policing and Security until 2013. Currently Professor Emeritus of Criminology, School of Global Governance and Regulation [REGNET] Research School of Asia and the Pacific. He has worked with a wide variety of criminal justice agencies, offender and crime victim services in Australia, China and Cambodia. He currently directs the ANU Cybercrime Observatory and continues interests in recidivism and resorative justice.

After a decade of research on crime victimisation and violent offending in Cambodia  he co-authored with Thierry and Brigitte Bouhours Violence and the Civilizing Process in Cambodia, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. This was a study: "...tracing the history of violence in Cambodia, the author evaluate the extent to which Elias’s theories can be applied in a non-Western context. Drawing from historical and contemporary archival sources, constabulary statistics, victim surveys, and newspaper reports, Broadhurst, Bouhours, and Bouhours chart trends and forms of violence throughout Cambodia from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Analysing periods of colonisation, anticolonial wars, independence, civil war, the revolutionary terror of the 1970s, and postconflict development, the authors assess whether violence has decreased and whether such a decline can be attributed to Elias’s civilising process, which identifies a series of universal factors that have historically reduced violence".

BA, BEd, PhD Univ.West. Aust., M.Phil 

1981  Certificate in Counselling, Psychodrama Institute of Australia

2000  Associate Consultant, Institute of Analytical Interviewing (USA)

• organised crime and transnational crime; e.g., triads 
• cybercrime
• crime in developing, post conflict and transitional states
• homicide, sexual assault and the causes of violence 
• victimology and crime victim surveys
• penology, recidivism studies; capture/re-capture analysis