Crime and violence outside the metropole: An Australian case study

Compared to the sprawling morass of city life, rural communities are often romanticized as places of “unquestionable moral virtue” (Lockie, 2000: 21), brimming with social capital and relatively crime free. They are assumed to be safer and healthier communities, and in many respects they are – greener, cleaner and easier to live in. However they are no less violent than urban areas. By triangulating crime data with mortality and morbidity data an empirical picture emerges that departs significantly from what many scholars and policy makers have too confidently assumed about violence and rural communities. The idealisation of rural life is partly the product of a set of assumptions arising from the modernisation thesis – what Tonnies referred to as the passage from a ‘Gemeinschaft’ to a ‘Gessellschaft’ society. Rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical ‘Gemeinschaft’ society, small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity. By contrast, violence, crime and disorder are misconceived in this model as the offshoots of ‘Gessellschaft’ social relations generated by modernising and urbanising processes (Tonnies 1887). This article challenges the myth perpetuated by modernisation thesis – that rural communities are relatively free of crime and violence