Violence and the architecture of rural life

Traditions of scholarship in the social sciences have tended to perpetuate the myth that rural communities are relatively violence-free by romanticising them as places of 'unquestionable moral virtue' (Lockie, 2001: 21). Similarly within criminology, most scholarly research about crime and violence has privileged the urban as the ideal laboratory of criminological research, neglecting the study of violence in rural contexts. It should not be surprising then that violence in rural societies has attracted little scholarly attention (for exceptions, see Coorey, 1990a; Alston, 1997; Women's Services Network 2000; Hogg & Carrington, 2006). This neglect is linked to the idea that violence is antithetical to an imagined but idealist conception of the rural Australian heartland - as a relatively crime-free territory. It is also the case that such violence where and when it does occur is far less likely to attract police or public attention, outside intervention and official recognition and hence remains relatively invisible to those who live in and outside rural communities. This chapter begins to debunk these mythical conceptions of rurality and address this knowledge gap. In so doing, it draws upon Australian Research Council (ARC) funded research on crime and violence in rural Australia published by myself and Russell Hogg in Policing the Rural Crisis (2006). The main component of that research project consisted of six community studies carried out in rural and regional New South Wales at various periods from 1997 to 2000.