'Failure' of social policies for rural youth

March 29, 2007

"Metro-centric" models of social policy designed to support victims and curb youth crime and violence are failing rural communities, according to the University of New England’s Professor Kerry Carrington.

Providing the opening address at the "Keeping Youth in Focus" conference in Tamworth yesterday, Professor Carrington noted that, generally, the further one moves from capital cities the higher the per capita rate becomes for violent crimes such as assault, domestic assault and sexual assault. Yet there are fewer services available to deal with these issues in regional and rural Australia.

She said that in 2005, of the top 50 "hot spots" in NSW for sexual assault, 39 were located in rural or regional areas, 10 in coastal areas, and only one in metropolitan Sydney. Similar figures were recorded for other types of assault. The pattern is broadly similar across most Australian jurisdictions.

Professor Carrington (pictured here) identified distinctive challenges facing rural youth. These include the lack of anonymity and higher visibility of young people (making them more prone to criminalisation for petty public order offences), and the lack of employment, educational and recreational opportunities. She said that more young women than men were leaving rural communities, leading to the entrenchment of a culture of risky drinking and violence among some of the young men that remained. "Thus," she said, "while the movement of young people away from rural areas to pursue wider opportunities is a problem, their presence is a source of constant anxiety as well."

These challenges to social policy are failing to be met due to what Professor Carrington called "metro-centric" models of human service delivery. "In order to meet needs outside of cities, policy makers have mistakenly assumed that the needs of rural communities are simply scaled-down versions of those of urban communities," she said.

Professor Kerry Carrington is Director of the Centre for Applied Research in Social Science at UNE. She is co-author (with UNE's Associate Professor Russell Hogg) of a book titled Policing the Rural Crisis, published last year by The Federation Press.

The "Keeping Youth in Focus" conference - a partnership between the Hunter New England Health Service, NSW Victims Services, the Violence Against Women Strategy, Juvenile Justice, and the Department of Community Services - continued in Tamworth today.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at March 29, 2007 03:52 PM