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'Cloak of silence' removed from rural crime

March 30, 2006

HoggCarri.thumb.jpgA book launched today at The University of New England removes what the authors call a “cloak of silence” that has concealed the true magnitude of crime rates in rural Australia.

The book presents the results of five years’ research revealing that the rate of violent crime in small rural communities exceeds the State average by 58 per cent. One of its authors, UNE’s Professor Kerry Carrington, said: “While property crime in rural centres is generally lower than the State average, violent crime exceeds the State average in many rural areas. This is contrary to the popular belief that violent crime is more prevalent in the cities.” (In fact, the book reports that the rate of violent crime in metropolitan Sydney is 9 per cent below the State average.)

"Policing the Rural Crisis", by Russell Hogg and Kerry Carrington, was published last month by Federation Press. Associate Professor Russell Hogg, like Professor Carrington, is a UNE academic. The research behind their book involved 230 days of fieldwork in a cross-section of rural communities.

“We found a significant under-reporting of violent crime,” Professor Carrington said, “with only one in ten such crimes being reported.” The authors discuss these crime rates in the context of changing race and gender relations in rural areas, the “rural crisis” fuelled by these and other changes, and the role of law and order campaigns in attempting to manage those changes.

Mr Hugh Dillon, a NSW Local Court Magistrate, launched "Policing the Rural Crisis" during a special function to celebrate the new book and its authors. "I hope it has a profound influence," he said, after congratulating the authors on the depth and quality of the book.

In dealing with the high incidence of violent crime in Indigenous communities, the book contrasts the “highly visible” nature of Indigenous crime with the “hidden” quality of its non-Indigenous counterpart. “We recommend that white communities acknowledge the problem as Aboriginal communities have done,” Professor Carrington said.

The authors emphasise that crime prevention and intervention procedures are largely based on urban models. “We need to devise models appropriate to rural contexts,” Professor Carrington said. “For example, in small towns refuges don’t work as an intervention procedure in cases of domestic violence: everyone knows where they are.”

“This raises another problem,” said Associate Professor Russell Hogg. “In the absence of necessary services there tends to be a fall-back on overly simplistic law and order responses to local crime problems.”

In his Preface to the book, the British criminologist Professor Tony Jefferson makes the point that, in addressing such problems, we need a “reality-based” starting point to “work through the painful, confusing and contradictory legacies of the past”. He concludes: “On the long-overlooked issue of rural crime in Australia, criminologists and criminal justice practitioners now have such a starting point.”

Posted by Jim Scanlan at March 30, 2006 02:59 PM