SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION, CONFLICT AND CRIME
IN FOUR RURAL AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITIES
ABSTRACT
Increasingly, rural societies exhibit same arrangements in social structure that
have long been associated with crime in urban centers. Consequently, a small but
growing corpus of criminological research has focused on crime in the rural context.
Yet, much of this work remains descriptive, with only a few notable attempts to apply
theory to the relationship of crime and rural communities. This paper examines how
community structure and context is related to rural crime by utilizing two structural
theories of crime, social disorganization and conflict, to guide the analyses. Four
rural communities in New South Wales were selected for case study: a large coastal
town and a small inland community with high proportions of Aboriginal People, and a
small inland community and a large coastal community with average percentages of
Aboriginal People. Two communities had relatively high crime levels and two had
lower than average crime levels, based on official crime statistics and corroborated
through key informant interviews. A quasi-experimental research design compares
the relationship between social integration/cohesion and conflict with crime and of
Aboriginal status on crime as well. The findings indicate that contexts conducive to
the development of crime in rural communities are a matter of both local social
disorganization and cultural conflict.
2
Convention