“Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy”: A Rejoinder
| Published date | 01 August 2002 |
| Author | Don Weatherburn |
| Date | 01 August 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.35.2.159 |
159
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 35 NUMBER 2 2002 PP.159–165
Address for correspondence: Dr Don Weatherburn, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and
Research, GPO Box 6, Sydney 2001, NSW Australia.
“Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary
Enemy”: A Rejoinder
Don Weatherburn
NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research
If you peer through the thicket of polemical distractions which surround the
argument of “Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy” (SBWAIE) it splits into
two contradictory strands. On the one hand its authors argue that I have misrepre-
sented their views in order to construct a disagreement with them where there is
none. On the other hand they argue that I am wrong in my disagreement with
them over crime and crime control. The last part of their paper involves a separate
complaint about my failure to discuss sexual assault. I will deal with each of these
issues in turn.
Have I Misrepresented Their Views and Constructed
an Artificial Debate?
The assumptions I said underpinned much Australian scholarly discussion of law
and order and which I set out to challenge were these:
(a) Australia does not have a serious crime problem, or if it does then it is no worse
than it has ever been or, if it is worse, then it is worse only in relation to
property crime, not in relation to violent crime.
(b) punitive law and order policies are not, by and large, a “rational” response to
crime.
(c) the low standard of public debate about crime can be blamed largely on the
cynical pursuit of commercial or political advantage by the media and politicians.
SBWAIE contends that I am “shadow boxing with an imaginary enemy”, that is, I
have manufactured a disagreement on one or more of these assumptions where
none exists. As they make no reference to (c), I assume their claim must be that,
like me, they reject both (a) and (b).
This seems hard to believe. Hogg and Brown, for instance, argue at page 47 of
their book Rethinking Law and Order that “the assumption that we are experiencing
a generalised and uniform increase in violence cannot easily be sustained”. On the
same page they say “If our society were being ‘engulfed’ by rising rates of violence, it
is hard to believe this would not be reflected in official homicide rates”. Similarly,
Indermaur argues at page 249 of his article “Are We Becoming More Violent?”
that: “If Australia was in the grip of a crime wave or somehow becoming more
violent, we should expect this to be evidenced by the higher rate at which we kill
each other”. At page 268 of the same article he says “The trend in assault rates
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