The aetiological crisis in South African criminology
| Author | Bill Dixon |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865813489697 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
46(3) 319–334
!The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865813489697
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Article
The aetiological crisis in
South African criminology
Bill Dixon
Keele University, UK
Abstract
Violent crime in South Africa has remained persistently high since the end of apartheid in
1994. Almost 16,000 murders at a rate of 31.9 per 100,000 of the population in 2010/11
attest to this. Violent crime remains a concern for government and has led one independent
observer to describe South Africa as ‘a country at war with itself’ (Altbeker, 2007). This
article argues that South African criminology has struggled to come to terms with the often
brutal reality of the post-apartheid condition. Drawing on a notion first used by Young (1986)
in relation to 1960s Britain, it suggests that stubbornly high rates of violent crime have given
rise to an aetiological crisis in South African criminology. An analysis of the origins and nature
of this crisis evident in recent writings on violent crime in South Africa is offered against the
background of international debates about what criminology is for. A solution to the crisis is
sought in work that connects history and biography (Mills, 1959) to reveal the causes, mean-
ings and uses of violence, and point the way to a more relevant post-colonial South African
criminology.
Keywords
aetiological crisis, crime, criminology, South Africa, violence
Introduction
In a recent report on the crime situation in the country, the South African Police Service
(SAPS) noted that, for the first time since it was created in 1995, the number of murders
had fallen ‘below the 16,000 mark’ (South African Police Service, 2011: 7). Despite a 28
per cent increase in the population, murders had decreased from 26,887 in 1995/96 to
15,940 15 years later – a fall of 53.2 per cent in the murder rate per 100,000 of the
population. Imperfect though the data may be (Altbeker, 2008), this is a substantial
achievement. Yet comparative data suggest that, almost two decades after the end of
apartheid, South Africans are still more likely to die as a result of intentional homicide
than citizens of all but a very few – mainly Caribbean and Central and South American –
countries (UNODC, 2012). With a murder rate in 2010/11 of 31.9 per 100,000 and
persistently high levels of other forms of what the SAPS (2011: 3 (Table 1), 5) identifies
Corresponding author:
Bill Dixon, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: w.j.dixon@keele.ac.uk
as the most serious forms of violent ‘contact’ crime, official concerns about crime and its
impact on South Africa’s economic performance and the quality of life of its citizens, are
acknowledged at the highest levels in government. A recent diagnostic study undertaken
by the National Planning Commission offers this analysis:
Crime levels are high in South Africa. Violent crime, contact crime and property crime are
so common that many South Africans live in fear. When people feel unsafe it makes it
harder for them to pursue their personal goals, and to take part in social and economic
activity. (National Planning Commission, 2011)
Other observers, less constrained by ties to government, tend to use more apocalyptic
language. The title of Antony Altbeker’s (2007) influential book on ‘South Africa’s crisis
of crime’ speaks of ‘a country at war with itself’. For Altbeker (2007: 48), like the
‘Harvard criminologist’ Chris Stone (2006: 4) whose work he quotes, ‘the distinctive
feature of crime in South Africa is not its volume but its violence’. It may be impossible
to say, as some have claimed, that South Africa is ‘the crime capital of the world’; but
there are no grounds for doubting that murder rates, and the incidence of other violent
crimes such as robbery, leave South Africans with ‘absolutely nothing to be proud of’
(Altbeker, 2007: 41).
The purpose of this article is not to add to Altbeker’s vivid account of the ‘crisis of
crime’ or to offer an explanation for it. The aim here is, rather, to draw attention to,
and attempt to account for, a closely related aetiological crisis in South African crim-
inology. The notion of aetiological crisis is taken from Jock Young’s (1986) criticism
of ‘mainstream’ Anglo-American criminology in the years after the Second World War
when a long period of growing affluence and expanded social welfare provision coin-
cided with a remorseless rise in official crime rates: ‘All of the factors which should
have led to a drop in delinquency if mainstream criminology were even half-correct,
were being ameliorated and yet precisely the opposite effect was occurring’ (Young
1986: 5–6). According to Young, the aetiological crisis in British post-war
criminology – eclectic, pragmatic and wedded to both positivism and correctionalism
– was at its deepest in the 1960s. A more radical criminology soon emerged in response
to the crisis but, by the mid-1980s, ‘the Thermidor’ had set in with the emergence of a
‘new administrative criminology involving a retreat from any discussion of causality’
(Young, 1986: 4). And so, writing in 1986, Young felt able to claim that, ‘we have now
a criminology that has well nigh abandoned its historical mission of the search for the
causes of crime’ (Young, 1986: 4). In this paper I suggest that, since the end of
apartheid, something rather similar has occurred in South African criminology. In
much the same way as ‘mainstream’ social democratic criminology was confounded
by the coincidence of inexorably rising crime rates with growth in real incomes, slum
clearances, improved educational attainment and the expansion of social services in
post-war Britain, so have those criminologists who looked forward to a new, demo-
cratic South Africa been nonplussed by the persistence of high levels of violent crime
in a country freed from the economic, social and cultural fetters of racist autocracy. If,
as Young argued, the aetiological crisis in British social democratic criminology
prompted by the failure of welfarism led to the development of an administrative
criminology uninterested in questions of causation, so too has the failure of
320 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 46(3)
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