Violence, Spatiality and Other Rurals
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.36.3.293 |
| Author | Kerry Carrington,Russell Hogg |
| Date | 01 December 2003 |
| Published date | 01 December 2003 |
Russell Hogg
Australian National University, Australia
Kerry Carrington
Australian Parliamentary Library, Australia
Occidentalism,which treats the other as the same,can be detected in
both the criminological and rural sociological treatment of violence
in the sociospatial sites of rural countrysides. Criminology tends to
mistakenly assume that violence in the modern world is primarily an
urban phenomenon (Baldwin & Bottoms, 1976, p. 1; Braithwaite, 1989,
p. 47). If violence in rural settings is encountered it tends to be treated as
a smaller scale version of the urban problem, or the importation of an
otherwise urban problem — as the corrupting influence of the
gesellschaft within the gemeinschaft. Within much rural sociology violence
is rendered invisible by the assumption that rural communities conform
to the idealised conception of the typical gemeinschaft society, small-scale
traditional societies based on strong cohesiveness, intimacy and organic
forms of solidarity. What these bonds conceal, rather than reveal —
violence within the family — remains invisible to the public gaze. The
visibility of violence within Aboriginal families and communities presents
a major exception to the spatially ordered social relations which render
so much white family violence hidden.The need to take into account the
complexity and diversity of these sociospatial relations is concretely
highlighted in our research which has taken us out of the urban context
and confronted us not only with the phenomenon of the violence of
other rurals1, but also with fundamentally competing claims on, and
conceptions of, space and place in the context of a racially divided
Australian interior. This article represents the second installment of
conceptual reflections on this research, with the first having been
published in this journal in 1998.
Beyond Urban-centric Criminology
or Towards a Spatially Attuned Criminology?
Numerically, most crime in western societies is committed in urban settings for the
obvious reason that most people live in cities. However, this does not mean that
crime in non-urban settings is not a significant or distinctive phenomenon worthy
of criminological study. One purpose of the research in rural New South Wales2
Address for correspondence: Russell Hogg, Reader, Faculty of Law, Australian National
University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Email: russell.hogg@anu.edu.au
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 2003 PP. 293–319
RUSSELL HOGG AND KERRY CARRINGTON
upon which this article is based is to redress this neglect. It may be that one reason
for the neglect is that the differences seem so “obvious” that they do not require
systematic study. If so, this may itself be revealing, not only in relation to common
assumptions made about the social and spatial correlates of crimes of violence but
also (and perhaps more significantly) deep-rooted cultural assumptions about the
nature of community.
Going back at least to the 19th century it is possible to identify various practical
strategies of social enquiry in which area differences in crime rates were seen as an
urban phenomenon linked to the disorder and social pathologies caused by the
impact of industrialisation and migration on the social organisation of communities
and their capacities to sustain stable authority structures and normative frameworks
to socialise and govern their members (Lindesmith & Levin, 1937). Of course in the
20th century the Chicago School came to be the most prominent and prolific
contributor to this tradition.3 They developed a spatialised analysis of the dispersion
of crime as one conforming to a series of concentric circles, with crime rates being
highest in the area adjacent to the city centre, the “zone of transition”, that experi-
enced the most intense processes of change, and thereafter progressively decreasing
with distance from the centre (see references for Endnote 3). Beyond the outer
concentric circle demarcating the boundaries of the city where the disorganising
effects of urban change do not run, or are muted, all is, at least tacitly, stable, peace-
ful and (relatively) crime free, according to this theoretical model anyway.
This remains a vital tradition of inquiry and theorising within criminology,
although in more recent work the emphasis has tended to shift from the offender
and the social-environmental causes of criminal behaviour to the offence and the
social-environmental patterns of criminal opportunity (Felson & Cohen 1981;
Felson, 1994; Sherman, Gartin, & Buerger, 1989). Some more comprehensive
attempts have been made to construct an analytical framework for the analysis of
area differences in both offence and offender rates. Al Reiss proposed the general
idea of “community crime careers” as a way of orienting analysis to the dynamics of
community change and their relationship to area crime rates and problems (Reiss,
1988). In the long-running Sheffield study Tony Bottoms and Paul Wiles have
examined residential area (offender) crime rates by reference to the workings of
housing markets and in particular the role of local authority housing policies in
conditioning the long-term social life and “community crime careers” of urban
areas (Bottoms & Wiles, 1992). Relying on Giddens’ theory of structuration they
seek to develop a more general framework for analysing crime in relation to place
and the constitutive role of routine temporal and spatial practices.
Variation in area crime rates in these studies are approached in terms of the
processes by which people and activities (i.e., land uses) are distributed in space and
time and the forms of social life and social control that are produced by these
processes. Bottoms and Wiles emphasise that these can never be examined as once
and for all distributions or static arrangements; nor should the decisions of actors
(individual and corporate), their effects (intended and unintended) or the meanings
they attach to space and place be overlooked in the analysis. Sociospatial allocation
processes (such as housing markets and policies) distribute people to places of
residence that can have immediate crime-relevant effects on the demography of an
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THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VIOLENCE, SPATIALITY AND OTHER RURALS
area (i.e., its age composition), but also condition the forms of social relations that
are fostered over time in those areas. These, of course, are also subject to the
ongoing effects of changes in housing, other markets, public policy and so on.
These approaches within criminology reflect the recent “spatial turn” within
the social sciences and social theory more generally within which the conventional
western philosophical orientation to events “ … unfolding in time alone … ” and
the neutralisation of space by the imperial march of time has been modified by a
growing interest in spatial analysis and distributions (Carter, 1987, p. xvi; Muecke,
1992; Latour, 1993; Harvey, 1996). Yet, to one degree or another, and more or less
explicitly, these recent contributions to environmental criminology perpetuate
elements of an evolutionary social ecology in which the simpler, more “natural”
processes of settlement in rural or folk society are understood to give way to the
more complex, problematic and opaque conditions and processes of urban settle-
ment and change. In much of this work, urban crime remains as an exemplary
social indicator of the costs that attend this transition and of the need for forms of
analysis that render it intelligible and amenable to social intervention which might
ameliorate its effects. The evolutionary-historical basis of such forms of analysis
resonates in the implicit treatment of rural social environments as the residual
expressions of earlier, simpler forms of community, organic solidarity and social
organisation, characterised by strong, affective bonds, effective families, high levels
of social cohesion and a low incidence of crime.
It is interesting that feminists, in criminology and more generally, have done
much to show how the type of enclosed, hierarchical, privatised model of belonging
that is implicitly idealised in environmental criminological analysis, whose focus
tends to be social breakdown and crime in the public space of the city, can be
productive of everyday violence and oppression that is relatively hidden and often
normalised (cf. Stanko, 1990; Stubbs, 1994; Hanmer & Maynard, 1987; Dobash &
Dobash, 1992). On another level altogether the mafia is of course an extreme
expression of violence emanating from such a form of community, as are various
forms of vigilantism (Brown, 1975).
In turning to our research on violence and crime in rural NSW we are mindful
of the need to connect up these different, spatially sensitive forms of analysis and to
shed the lingering vestiges of evolutionary social ecology in criminology.
Other Rurals
There are a number of ways of defining rurality (Bell, 1992; Wirth, 1956/1969;
Weisheit, Falcone, & Wells, 1996), all of which have their limitations (see Lockie
& Bourke, 2001, pp. 5–9). The main point to arise from these debates is that rural-
ity is considerably more unstable, diverse, contested and fragmented a phenomenon
than commonly perceived (Cloke & Little, 1997, p. 1). Nevertheless, the intellec-
tual study of the rural has been obsessed with “occidentalist” images of the country-
side, “whether by being hung up on agriculture (by tracing all forms of social
relations back to the farms and...
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