Page 290 - Week 01 - Thursday, 14 February 2008
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makes it very clear that we need a whole-of-government approach to crime and justice; knee-jerk reactions such as boot camps, three strikes and you are out or perhaps mounted police are generally ineffective programs.
One of the ongoing challenges in developing effective responses to crime and criminal behaviour is to minimise reactive responses to crime problems and develop more collaborative approaches. Collaborative responses to criminal behaviour are those where a range of stakeholders who are all equally committed to reducing crime in the community work in partnership.
As I said before, Neighbourhood Watch programs are no longer as effective as they were. That is partly because they are not getting the resources that they used to get, but also because neighbourhoods work differently now. We need to have more mechanisms in place to build neighbourhood solidarity so that if, for instance, I am home alone and afraid—afraid for good reason; sometimes people are afraid not for good reason—I feel I can contact my neighbour. These sorts of social capital programs are what Neighbourhood Watch used to be about, but we need different strategies.
We also need to realise the interconnectedness of crime and make sure that we do not just deal with the problem right there as it is happening. We need to realise that many delinquents and criminals—people who offend; I do not like the word “criminal” too much in this regard—have come to that because of the way they were treated as children. There is a huge amount of research now that shows that childhood maltreatment increases the risk of delinquency and crime.
This report refers to a study—admittedly an old one, in 1989, though there are some more recent ones referred to—which followed 1,575 individuals over a 25-year period spanning childhood to adulthood, comparing the arrest records of 908 children who suffered abuse and neglect with a group of 667 non-maltreated people. The report states:
Widom found that being abused or neglected as a child increased the likelihood of arrest as a juvenile by 59 per cent, of arrest as an adult by 28 per cent and of violent crime by 30 per cent, even after controlling for the influences of age, gender and race and ethnicity …
Let us remember that looking after our children is the best thing we can do to make a safer community.
Yesterday I referred to the role of alcohol in the kinds of events we were talking about. Last year the New South Wales Parliamentary Library produced statistics which showed that alcohol is implicated in 47 per cent of assaults; 37 per cent and 18 per cent of all road injuries, with males in the former category and females in the second; 16 per cent of cases of child abuse; 12 per cent of male suicides; eight per cent of female suicides; 44 per cent of injuries resulting from fire; 34 per cent of drowning incidents; and 34 per cent of injuries sustained as a result of a fall. We need to acknowledge and be honest about that. What if we applied to alcohol a health awareness campaign similar to the one that we have applied to cigarettes? Obviously it is a different issue, but we need to put our heads around the way we might approach
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