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Home > Research > Vulnerable Communities > Modelling Inter-Group Violence
Modelling Inter-Group Violence
Police responses to violent incidents, disorder and ethnically motivated disputes continue to challenge and drain police resources. In the post 9/11 era new types of public safety emergencies, coupled with a range of contemporary ethnic, religious, cultural and ideological issues, create new challenges for the police and raise public concern about the growing social isolation and marginalisation of particular groups. This project seeks to better understand the spatial and temporal dynamics of communities vulnerable to growing levels crime, disorder, inter-group violence and inter-group hostility. Our research will identify the various pathways and mechanisms leading not only to particular vulnerabilities, like inter-group violence, but those that lead to converging vulnerabilities. Additionally, this project will provide a framework from which to progress future research for other marginalised groups such as young people, Indigenous people and gays and lesbians across urban and non-urban settings.
This research forms the foundation of a long term research project that seeks to build a comprehensive longitudinal study of community resilience in the Australia context. Our research aims to:
- Develop an integrated ecological theory of community regulation to account for the spatial, static and dynamic processes associated with social cohesion and trust, the exchange of material and social support, the willingness of residents to intervene and cultural tolerance;
- Determine whether or not there are differences in the importance of these community-level processes in predicting different types of vulnerability in different types of communities. For example, are the collective processes that create opportunities for general forms of violence (e.g. robberies, assaults) the same community-level processes that lead to inter-group violence more specifically?; and
- Identify the characteristics of communities that demonstrate a greater resilience to subtle social disruptions (such as population changes, increased immigration concentration and ethnic heterogeneity) and, conversely, identify the characteristics of communities that are vulnerable to the impact of these more subtle forms of social disruption.
To achieve these broad research aims we will draw on a number of ecological theories of crime, with a particular focus on systemic theories of community regulation, collective efficacy theory, constrict theory and situational action theory.
To test these models, we completed a major Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) survey and in-depth face-to face interviews with nearly 10,000 people across nearly 300 suburbs in Brisbane and Melbourne in 2010. The survey builds on two earlier waves of a community survey (funded by the ARC in 2005 and 2007) across 148 suburbs in the Greater Brisbane area and comprises the first wave of what we hope will become a similar longitudinal study of community processes across 150 suburbs in Melbourne in 2010. Our face-to face component of the survey includes a booster sample of nearly 1,000 people from communities in our sample that have high rates of hard-to-reach ethnic minorities. Completing the survey during 2010 was a major undertaking for our team, with much valued input from our CEPS research and industry partners. Costing $750,000, the successful implementation of the survey was a significant investment for CEPS.
Our research considers the role of key institutions, like the police, in creating a willingness for residents to work together to solve local problems. It also considers the role of ties that are both endogenous and exogenous to the community through employment. In particular we examine the impact of exogenous ties on the provision of social and material support for residents. Also new to the follow-up phase is the addition of work on procedural justice and legitimacy. One important mechanism that fashions people’s response to police is the level of trust and confidence held by particular groups towards the police administering their authority fairly and justly (Herbert 2006). Research has shown that low levels of trust and confidence are pronounced in certain communities (Sherman 2001), undermining police/community cooperation, which is essential to effective crime control. Evidence indicates that people who feel they have been treated with procedural justice by an authority will be more likely to trust that authority (Murphy 2005), view them as legitimate (Tyler 2004), cooperate with that authority (Sunshine & Tyler 2003), and accept its decisions and follow its directions willingly (Tyler 2006). This has flow on effects to reducing crime and increasing social cohesion in at-risk communities. Additionally, through the oversampling of ethnical minority residents, this wave of the CCS enables differences in dynamic community processes that may be attributable to ethnic diversity and/or immigration concentration to be explored. Other data collected through our surveys include measures of community attachment; community relationships; perceptions of community problems; previous victimisation; perceptions of neighbourhood problems; perceptions of responsibility for problems; perceptions of neighbourhood safety; geographic mobility; and specific social capital concepts such as place attachment; intergenerational closure; network structure; reciprocal exchange; and civic participation.
Professor Lorraine Mazerolle (Chief Investigator)
Dr Rebecca Wickes (Research Fellow)
Renee Zahnow (Research Assistant)
Elise Sargeant (PhD Student/Research Assistant)
Associate Professor Tina Murphy (Associate Investigator)
Dr Adrian Cherney (Associate Investigator)
Professor Louise Lemeyre (Research Associate)
Professor Tom Tyler (Visiting Scholar in 2011)
