Australia is safer than it used to be, but family violence persists -  SMH -  Caitlin Fitzsimmons - 21 July 2018

I was walking down the street the other day when I found an iPad on the footpath, propped against a neighbour’s fence.

Someone had clearly lost the device, while another person had put it aside so the owner could find it but no one would tread on it in the meantime.

This was the moment I knew the gentrification of my inner-city suburb was complete – even if the graffiti in the railway tunnel still says “die Yuppie scum”.

This incident would have been unlikely a couple of decades ago, and not just because iPads hadn’t been invented yet.

Most crimes are down since the 1990s.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, almost everyone I knew had been burgled at least once, thieves broke into my dad’s car to steal CDs from the glove box almost every time we went to the beach, and on one memorable occasion a school friend had his brand-name sport shoes stolen from his feet at knifepoint in a suburban shopping mall on Sydney’s north shore.

I never felt that Australia was especially crime-ridden but a certain amount of property crime used to be a given. And that's no longer the case in both Sydney and Melbourne.

Figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research show the raw incidence of most crimes – including robbery, break and enter, and motor vehicle thefts – is down since 1990, even without adjusting for the massive growth in population.

For a fair comparison that takes population into account, the key metric is the rate of criminal incidents for every 100,000 people. In 1990, for every 100,000 people in NSW there were about 96 cases of robbery (both armed and unarmed), while in 2017 the rate was less than 32 in 100,000.

In 1990, the rate of break-and-enter crimes (both dwellings and non-dwellings) was about 1639 in 100,000 while in 2017 it was down to less than 496 in 100,000. In 1990, there were about 935 cases of motor vehicle theft for every 100,000 people, while in 2017 it was down to 170.

I was only able to obtain crime figures for Victoria since 2009, but there’s the same trend with property crime falling significantly over the shorter time frame.

So we’re less likely to be robbed, burgled or have our car stolen than we used to be. That’s all well and good but the official figures also suggest a rise in violent crime.

In NSW the reported rate of assault is up from 511 in 100,000 in 1990 to 810 in 100,000 in 2017. The rate of sexual assault is up from about 28 in 100,000 to about 75 in 100,000 over the same time, while the rate of other sexual offences is up from 44 in 100,000 to 96 in 100,000.

In Victoria, the reported rates of assault, sexual offences, abduction and stalking have all risen since 2009.

Criminologists say it’s impossible to know whether the rates of assault and sexual assault have really increased or if it’s just that the reported rates have increased. There's anecdotal evidence that as societal attitudes have changed, victims have become more likely to report domestic violence and sexual assault.

A robust measure to study is the murder rate, because this is a crime that doesn't go undetected. Interestingly, despite the reported rise in other violent incidents, the murder rate has fallen in line with property crimes.

In 1989-90 there were 1.9 murders in Australia for every 100,000 of population, and by 2013-14 the rate was just 1.1 in 100,000, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology's national homicide monitoring program.

Nearly nine out of 10 murderers are men – 88 per cent of offenders in 2013-14. Nearly two out of three – or 64 per cent – of victims are also men. However, the chances of a man being murdered has declined more sharply than the odds for a woman, the AIC figures suggest.

In 1989-90, 2.53 men in every 100,000 were murdered across Australia, compared with 1.36 women. Fast forward to 2013 and the murder rate for male victims was 1.28 in every 100,000, while the rate for female victims had dropped to 0.83 in 100,000.

That means the rate of Australian men being murdered has almost halved since 1989-90, while the rate of women being murdered has also declined but only by 39 per cent. More recent state-based figures show a similar trend.

In the two years from 2012-14, more than two out of five murders involved an offender and a victim in a domestic relationship, more than one in four cases were acquaintances, and only 13 per cent were stranger homicides (including those known to each other for less than 24 hours).

Women are more likely than men to die at the hands of an intimate partner, representing 79 per cent of such deaths. Men are more likely than women to be killed in other circumstances; male victims account for 83 per cent of murders by an acquaintance and 92 per cent of murders by strangers, the AIC says.

While all are equally tragic, there are many more victims like Cecilia Haddad, the Sydney businesswoman allegedly murdered by her ex-lover, than those like Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon, raped and murdered allegedly by a stranger in a park.

Get it? Men and women are both less likely to be murdered than they used to be, but things have improved for men faster than for women. Since most female murder victims die at the hands of their male partners, it seems family violence remains an intractable problem.

People might be less likely to take an iPad lying on the street these days, but there are bigger problems to solve.

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