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The Character, Impact and Prevention of Crime in Regional Australia

1-3 August, 2001

Jupiters Hotel, Townsville

Crime and Violence in Rural New South Wales
Assoc Prof Kerry Carrington and Dr Russell Hogg
University of Western Sydney, New South Wales

Abstract
Rural regional communities are often imagined to be naturally cohesive, relatively crime free environments. However, the ideal low crime rate rural community - has been more assumed than studied. Crime too tends to be assumed to be an index of the weakening of communal bonds and the growing social disorganisation cause by the processes of urbanisation in major population centres. Consequently the impact of crime in non-metropolitan Australia has been largely neglected, both as an area of study and as a public policy issue of significance.

A review of the available empirical evidence revels that per capita crime rates are relatively high in some rural regional areas of Australia, and in some cases dramatically so, when compared to metropolitan centres. This opens up a range of interesting questions concerning the differential social construction of crime problems in a variety of rural regional civic contexts relevant to assessing their impact and prevention.

Our interest in this topic stems from a three-year study of the historical, cultural and socio-economic dimensions of crime and violence in five rural communities in NSW, funded by the Australian Research Council. The paper draws upon the findings of this original empirical research to construct an analysis of the spatial-distribution of crime in rural regional Australia that avoids privileging the urban community as the social laboratory for criminological research.

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