10 MYTHS OF AUSTRALIAN CRIME
Bang! Bang! You're not dead
The Best Australian Essays 2010 (Black Inc, 2010)
Most crime in Australia is spiralling out of control, downwards. Our murder rate is near a historic low. Burglaries have collapsed. Car theft is disappearing. Armed robbers rarely rob banks and drug-addicted street thieves are not stabbing anyone with syringes.
Little old ladies living at home alone are among the safest people in society. They are not targeted by roving gangs of feral kids, or anyone else much, apart from overseas internet fraudsters. Our police cells are not clogged with hard-drug users, and haven't been for almost a decade. Horrible, life-shattering, violent events do happen every day, but not to many people and, more crucially, not to many people over 25 years old.
The angry old men of talkback radio play up to an ageing audience's fear of crimes that are highly unlikely to affect them. It's crude, cruel and popular entertainment, with only the softest grounding in the reality of risk.
I visited the undistinguished but secure-looking headquarters of the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) in the public-service ghetto of Griffith, ACT, and spoke to its experts in every field from homicide monitoring to firearms theft, in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, to get the real picture of crime in Australia, and address 10 myths.
1 The murder rate is rising
It seems as if there is more murder because there is more media. Every discovered homicide is reported in every available detail. Murder trials last for weeks or months and every claim is tested. The worst media linger over the pornography of death: blood on the bludgeon, the desperate struggle, the final gasp for breath.
But in 2008, only 260 Australians - out of a population of about 21.5 million - were murdered. Although this was a rise of five murders on 2007, numbers have tumbled since 1999, when 344 people were killed. Rates were at their peak in the late '70s and '80s, when two people in every 100,000 could expect to be murdered. The figure is now 1.2 in every 100,000. (By comparison, you are almost five times more likely to be murdered in the US.)
It used to be that most victims were murdered by their friends and acquaintances, but there has been an inexplicable drop in amicicide in Australia, which has left "intimate partner" homicides at the top of the table.
"Why friends are now suddenly not killing each other as frequently as they were 10 years ago is not something we've been able to identify in any meaningful way," says Jason Payne, of the AIC's national homicide-monitoring and drug-use-monitoring programs.
Payne is a master of AIC speak, which is always heavily qualified and duly weighted, but differs from standard Canberra bureaucratese in that its aim is to illuminate the truth rather than obscure it. Most people here talk in long, considered sentences, with chains of clauses all linked to relentlessly logical, unemotional conclusions. They examine percentages, ratios and deviations to analyse how and why - and indeed whether - Australians are being killed, raped and robbed.
Only 12 per cent of homicides involved the use of a gun. The number of Australians dying of gunshot wounds has decreased since the 1996 National Agreement on Firearms, but the rate was already falling before it was introduced. There is debate as to whether the legislation has contributed to the decline in gun murders, but it has certainly halved the number of firearms reported stolen (from about 4000 a year in the 1990s to about 2000).
"Mind you," says Samantha Bricknell, author of the AIC's Firearms Theft and Facts and Figures series, "we're not really finding any improvements in compliance. We're still finding about 40 per cent of owners are being recorded by police as not being storage compliant."
Police recover 12 to 13 per cent of stolen firearms. "But we don't really know what happens to the rest," says Bricknell. "Our data, while probably an underestimate, has shown that in any given year, firearms from about two per cent of theft incidents are then known to be associated with a criminal offence." (The 2008 figures include three suicides.)
There are about 765,000 gun owners in Australia, with about 2.5 million registered firearms - and probably the same number of unregistered weapons - but, says Bricknell, "You're more likely to be killed by someone punching you in the face than being shot. We've got a lot of firearms in the country, but I don't think we're a particularly violent bunch." Recent events in Sydney and Melbourne show that if you are a professional criminal (that is, you get caught a lot) or an associate, there's a chance you'll be shot at by business rivals, but professionals are generally not interested in targeting outsiders.
2 Little old ladies aren't safe in the streets ...
Our worst fears and deepest sympathies are spared for the most helpless: the frail aged who have already lived through so much - poverty, war, widowhood, grief - only to end up as easy targets for drug-addicted wild boys who'll bash them over their head for the change in their purse.
But most street robbers do not target vulnerable old people, partly because there is not much point. An old lady is unlikely to be carrying an iPod, iPhone or anything else they could easily use or on-sell. Out of the 5228 people who reported being victims of an armed robbery in 2007 - and most armed robberies are reported - only 40 of them were women over 65.
Also, older people tend not to be out between 6pm and 6am, when two-thirds of armed robberies occur. Most victims of so-called "muggers" are not little old ladies but big young men.
"With the exception of kids aged zero to 14," says AIC research analyst Lance Smith, "the group of Australians that experiences the lowest rates of robbery victimisation is women aged 55 and over."
In 2007, in those states for which the AIC has comprehensive data, only three per cent of people robbed at knifepoint suffered a serious injury. The injury - and it is classified as an injury - most often reported by robbery victims is trauma. But if victims had realised how little danger of serious injury they faced, the experience might have been less traumatic.
3... or in their homes
By global standards, Australian homes seem well defended. People bar the windows of their terrace houses and draw steel shutters across timber fronts. They fear the intimacy of burglary, a stranger assessing their possessions, foreign hands on family heirlooms, crawling noises in the night.
But the rate of reported burglaries in Australia has plummeted by 40 per cent over the past 12 years - and burglary is another crime police usually get to hear about, if only because victims have to fill out a police report to make an insurance claim. Not much time has been spent looking into reasons for the happy decline of burglary (research money tends to flow towards crimes that are rising) but many people have made their homes more secure.
There were never many people in the burgling game, anyway. "About five to 10 per cent of the offending population are responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of property crimes committed," says Payne.
And only a very small proportion would target the elderly. "If you knew an old person lived in a house," says Kelly Richards, the AIC's juvenile justice expert, "you would know that most of their stuff is not actually very desirable. They probably don't have a plasma-screen TV, a great laptop, a digital camera ... The sorts of things that get bumped off really don't feature in older people's houses."
4 Most criminals are hard-drug users
"You hear that drugs are fuelling a lot of crime out there, the burglaries and other things, because people are trying to fence the material to get money to buy drugs," says AIC director Adam Tomison, a man who, before he took up his current post, acted as adviser for the "Little Children Are Sacred" NT Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. "But drug-related arrests have come down by eight per cent since 1996/97."
The number of criminals caught carrying drugs has fallen, too. For 10 years, the AIC's Drug Use Monitoring Australia program has looked at eight different police lock-ups across the country, drug-tested detainees and interviewed them about their recent drug use. The tests are voluntary, the results are confidential, and the researchers sometimes hand out Mars bars.
"Interestingly enough, the detainees don't mind it," says Jason Payne. "There was a lot of scepticism about the number who'd be willing to participate, but we get 70 to 80 per cent of people agreeing to tell us, and then about 80 per cent of those people supply us with urine. So it's huge in terms of compliance rates, and certainly unexpected for a criminal-justice system project."
The results, says Payne, show that "heroin [use] nationally is at the lowest it's been for some time". Early in 2001 - when Australian heroin use was around its historic peak - there was a sudden heroin shortage, which led to an increase in the price and decrease in the purity of the drug.
"Within the space of three or four months," says Payne, "the number of our detainees who tested positive for heroin went down from around 40 per cent to 16 per cent. What we've seen in our data since that time is pretty much a stabilisation of roughly 10 to 15 per cent of detainees testing positive to heroin in the Sydney site."
There was a sudden, unsustained increase in cocaine use, but no one really knows whether heroin users cleaned up or switched drugs. Amphetamine use increased from about 1999 to 2006, but has subsequently declined by about five to 10 per cent across most sites.
The AIC study does not distinguish between "ice" and other amphetamines, so it's difficult to say whether there really is an "ice epidemic". "Fewer people in police custody are using any kind of amphetamine," says Payne, "but we don't know what the relative proportion of amphetamine types are within that. We ask our detainees whether they've heard of any new drugs for sale on the street and, even to this day, we get detainees telling us they've heard of a new drug called 'ice', but that may be because of the media coverage."
5 One in two women has experienced sexual violence
"If you want to go for the most sensationalist aspect, you could say one in two women has been sexually assaulted in some sense," says Tomison. "That would include non-contact offences."
Australia suffers from horrific rates of sexual violence, and sexual assault is one of the crimes least likely to be reported. But reported sexual assaults increased by 51 per cent between 1995 and 2008, and in 2009 police recorded 18,800 victims of the crime, 84 per cent of whom were female. Although changes in social attitudes have led more women (and men) to take their attackers to court, these figures are still greatly understated.
The AIC considers prevalence studies more reliable than police figures. A prevalence study is a survey in which respondents are asked if they have experienced certain behaviour over a given period. About one in two women reveal they have been a victim of a sex crime at some time in their lives, and only about a third of those reported the offence.
Tabloid news loves a sexual predator, a loner stalking joggers, a family man abducting random pedestrians in a panel van, a rapist with choking fingers and charcoal eyes. But most victims of sexual assault have not been raped. In NSW, for instance, there is no offence of "rape". Rape is seen as part of a spectrum of behaviour that can be classified as sexual assault, the definition of which includes "non-contact offences", such as "flashing" or exposing a child to pornography, as well as gang rape at gunpoint. Contact offences can include being "groped" in a nightclub.
Tomison stresses that even "inappropriate touching" can traumatise someone for years, but, says Richards, "For young women, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who hadn't been groped at a bar or had their boobs squeezed at a nightclub."
Kelly Richards grew up in Sydney's western suburbs, haunted by the gang rape-murders of 26-year-old Anita Cobby in 1986 and 20-year-old Janine Balding in 1988. It was those hideous crimes that sparked her interest in criminology, but she stresses most sexual assaults now happen in the home. And between 1995 and 2005, 40 per cent of recorded sexual assaults were attacks on children under 14. "Essentially, once you become 25, your chance of becoming a victim of sexual assault drops dramatically," she says.
6 Strangers are a danger
When women are raped, it is rarely at the hands of a desperate sadist lurking in an alley. Most victims are attacked by a man they know. "The fear is all around stranger danger," says Richards, "but the relative risk of being attacked by a stranger is minute compared with the risk of being victimised in the home, which is actually quite substantial."
In 2008, 78 per cent of victims were assaulted by either a family member or someone else they knew, and 65 per cent were attacked in a private home (as opposed to only seven per cent on the street).
Murder victims usually know their killers, too (since the majority are their present or former partners). Strangers commit about 30 per cent of homicides that involve males, and only about five per cent of those involving females.
"It's the same as assaults," says Tomison. "Often who's assaulting you is someone you know. There are drunken street brawls and the like, but often that's by people they know as well, in some sense."
In the 1970s, much money and energy was expended in warning children about the risks of associating with strangers. It is now clear that while this was happening, many kids were being systematically sexually assaulted by their relatives, their teachers, their priests and their sports trainers.
So was the stranger-danger campaign an irresponsible waste of time?
"Well, it probably was, to a large extent," says Richards.
7 All women share the same risk of domestic violence
Throughout the 1970s and '80s, various campaigns stressed that domestic violence can happen to any woman, anywhere. All relationships looked like potential prisons run by angry warders who beat their helpless captives at whim. But, statistically, all women are not at equal risk. "It isn't just a working-class problem," says Richards, "but by and large, it occurs more in more socially disadvantaged communities, and, of course, where it happens the most is in indigenous communities, which are incredibly disadvantaged."
There is no specific offence of "domestic assault". Much violence in the home is reported simply as assault, and assault figures in Australia are rising - between 1996 and 2008, there was a 49 per cent increase in assaults reported - but the majority of those were young men on young men.
"Young people tend to victimise each other," says Richards, "and the cohort of young offenders and young victims are not two separate groups at all. You might be an offender one week and victim the next."
"It's impossible to have a conversation about crime and justice in Australia without addressing the indigenous issue," says Richards. While the NT has the highest homicide rate per capita, AIC crime-prevention expert Peter Homel says, "The biggest violence figures these days in NSW remain out in western NSW, particularly north-western NSW, where there is a large concentration of Aboriginal people." Part of this is simply a question of demographics. Indigenous people tend to have more children, and the indigenous population is, on average, younger, with a lower life expectancy.
Prevalence studies suggest one in three women have survived domestic violence. However, like sexual assault - which, says Richards, "should perhaps be called 'sexual offending' " - domestic violence is now viewed as a spectrum, encompassing yells and threats as well as punches and kicks.
While Tomison is careful not to minimise the potential to intimidate and control another person with angry words, he concedes, "The definition of domestic violence is quite broad these days. It also includes economic and social violence, if you like. In the public domain, I think the risk is that people will see it all in the one barrel, and therefore feel it's everywhere and everything's happening all the time, and perhaps overstate the situation."
The huge majority of cases in the courts feature men attacking women, but some estimates from general population surveys show almost as many men as women are injured in domestic disputes.
But there is a "qualitative difference" in men's experience of domestic violence, says Tomison. "Typically, the male may be assaulted in response to an assault that he's committed." Men in an abusive relationship are generally less physically vulnerable and less financially dependent, and it's much easier for them to walk away.
8 Alcohol causes violence
Everybody knows that alcohol causes violence, because everyone has seen drunks fight in the pub, or at least heard about it, or seen closed-circuit TV footage of drunken battles on the streets of Surfers Paradise on the news.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey asked people if they had been assaulted by somebody under the influence of alcohol in the past 12 months. About four per cent of respondents said that, to their knowledge, they had been.
But "one of the important things about the alcohol-violence relationship is that most people who drink aren't violent", says Payne. "Most people go out or drink at home and never end up in a violent altercation of any kind."
Most people who turn violent when they're drunk are - like the majority of offenders at most levels - men under 25, who tend to drink "in environments where there is a lot of machismo and a whole range of other environmental and social characteristics which, in and of themselves, are also likely to give rise to violence", says Payne.
"There's a very unlikely chance that two friends sitting down drinking together at home, watching television, will turn into a violent incident," he says, "whereas an alternative environment - loud, pumping music in a nightclub, for example, or a high-paced situation - might be more likely to result in violence."
A study in Queensland by Ross Homel of Griffith University found that a significant amount of nightclub violence could be avoided simply by employing less aggressive bouncers, replacing glasses with plastic cups and by rearranging the interior of the building so the main thoroughfare from the street or to the toilets did not pass near the bar, so people didn't bump into each other and spill drinks so often.
Drunken violence tends to happen the most around "entertainment precincts" where there are - unsurprisingly - a lot of pubs and bars.
I meet Ross Homel's brother, Peter, in his home in Stanmore, in Sydney's inner west, our conversation awkwardly punctuated by exclamation marks dropped from planes on the Sydney Airport flight path. As the AIC's crime-prevention expert, Peter, like his brother, has given a lot of thought to entertainment-precinct violence.
"Part of the reason people are attracted to these locations is there's an edginess," he says. "They're about being in exciting and strange, potentially risky areas. Work my brother did around some of the nightclubs on the Gold Coast did a very good job at reducing the violence, but also made them pretty boring."
9 Drugs cause violence
Everyone knows people go mad on drugs, leap out of windows believing they can fly, peel their skin because they think they're oranges, or generally express their hatred for the "straight" world by going on a "drug-fuelled rampage", leaving behind the inevitable "trail of destruction".
But "there's not a lot of evidence that links the pharmacological effects of a drug on subsequent behaviour without mediating factors", says Payne. "The only definitive biological link that people have identified between amphetamine - which is the main drug people talk about when they talk about violence - and violence is that after long periods of amphetamine use, people can develop a level of psychosis that makes them very paranoid and indeed alters brain chemistry, which arguably has been linked to irrational thoughts, aggressive behaviour and those sorts of things. But actually identifying a direct effect - 'Take a tablet, go and commit a violent offence' - it doesn't exist."
Their drugs habit might have increased their "need" to commit robberies, says Payne, "but in quite a lot of cases, people who use drugs already had histories of offending, so we cannot definitively say, 'Because you're a druggie, you're an offender.' "
10 Computer crime is massive and widespread
New technology tends to give rise to new fears and new crimes - or at least new names for old ones. The internet has given birth to a range of potential offences including "online grooming", "cyberstalking", "cyberbullying" and "identity theft". These sound much scarier than approaching a child, following a woman, throwing stones at the quiet kids or using somebody else's credit cards - but how much of a problem are they really?
Raymond Choo, the AIC's cybercrime specialist, says more than 150 people were charged with online child-sex exploitation (offenders "grooming" children on the net) in the past financial year. Choo estimates the number of unreported offences as "between hundreds and thousands".
I meet Russell Smith, the AIC's authority on computer crime and fraud, at the Qantas Club in Melbourne Airport, a no-man's land of laptop-absorbed business people. "There's a perception that electronic fraud and credit-card fraud is rife and increasing," says Smith. "It's actually very small."
According to the Australian Payments Clearing Association, out of the 4.5 billion banking and credit-card transactions each year, only about 660,000 are fraudulent. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that about five per cent of the population were victims of phishing scams, "Nigerian letters" and the like. A smaller number actually gave up any money. Some transactions were huge but most only lost a few hundred dollars.
Computer crimes are relatively easy to commit but "there's probably only a relatively small proportion of people who want to engage in that sort of stuff anyway", says Smith. "The opportunities are there to a greater extent than available criminals."
The fact of the matter is, australians are not very criminal at all. "A good example is the way the Australian Tax Office approaches its compliance activities," explains Russell Smith. "They assume that the vast bulk of the population is going to be law-abiding and fill out their tax returns correctly and honestly, and won't try to do anything deceptive. If the vast bulk of the population weren't that honest, the tax system wouldn't be able to operate."
Speaking personally, I have been seriously assaulted twice and hospitalised as a result. Under current definitions, I have also been sexually assaulted twice. A place where I was living has been burgled, I have had my "identity" stolen in a credit-card fraud, and I once left the front door open and woke up to find a homeless man asleep in my bath. I have known a murderer, a burglar and a rapist. I have had knives pulled on me at least twice. But most of this happened overseas, and I guess I'm just unlucky.
Because, as much as desperate politicians and dishonest radio demagogues would like you to think otherwise, most Australians do not have much to fear from crime and, in many categories of offence, those who are most likely to fall victim to the crime are also those likeliest to commit it.
So does this knowledge help the AIC's criminologists sleep soundly?
"There's no link between people's fear and concern about crime and the reality," says Richards. "And I think that is the case even when you understand the reality. I know that my risk of being kidnapped, taken off the street and sexually assaulted, or somebody raiding my house with a gun, are incredibly small, but my fear and concern about that happening is much, much greater than the risk. I think that's justified, because the point for me isn't that it's incredibly unlikely to happen, it's that if it happens - and it does happen - it would have such an overwhelming effect on every aspect of your life, it is, for me, worth avoiding the risk altogether. I know that catching the train home at night is unlikely to end up with my body in a paddock, but I'd still rather stay in a hotel or get a cab.
"Some parents obviously overestimate the risk that their children will be abducted and killed or sexually assaulted, but I think - in fact, I know - even when parents understand that risk is incredibly small, they don't want to be that one in a million. And I think that's totally valid."