Nightlife ethnography, violence, policing and security

Night leisure has long served as a social site for the enactment and reproduction of violence in Australia. To a significant, but now shifting, extent this has been implicitly condoned in a situation of official disinterest, lax policing and limited public attention. Existing criminological paradigms of explanation that focus almost exclusively on interactive honour contests (Polk 1999) between men have downplayed the fostering of such violence in state institutional arrangements of public drinking that shore up private profit via promoting high levels of consumption. Equally, popular accounts of conflicts, assaults and even killings as the result of an inherent social pattern of male sexual competition serve to naturalise violence as gendered bedrock. After dark violence has continued to blight public leisure with major social, criminal justice and public health cost. The connection of nightlife and masculine violence has been thrown into even sharper relief