By Dave Riley
The way we are encouraged to view them, our working — and particularly our living environments — are hostile places. While we may view our homes as safety zones, outside the front door is something else again. Even a walk to the local corner shop could place us at risk. Walled in, with doors locked and windows barred, we create our own little enclave of security in front of the television.
Mum, dad and the kids at home are the bedrock image of our society. That's what it's supposed to be all about — the studying, the working, saving, marrying, fornicating and consuming all add up to this. All's well so long as we have each other.
For extra confidence, you can do what National MP Bob Katter Jnr does and keep a loaded firearm under every bed. And next time you vote, maybe you could demand more police and tougher sentencing of convicted felons.
When the front page of the local daily reminds you how unlucky some granny was to be battered to death in her bed one morning for less than $30 — "the nicest, kindest, gentlest soul you could imagine" — maybe you should get up and check those locks again. As the folk in Neighbourhood Watch say: you never know who's out there.
Just when you think you have all possible options covered, some knowledgeable type interrupts your viewing enjoyment to insist that TV's weekly fare of 500-odd killings — let alone the physical abuse, extramarital sex, coarse language, verbal abuse, sexual innuendo and nudity — are warping our brains, particularly those of our progeny.
Characters popular, for good or ill, with children are judged guilty of turning the young onto violence. Despite all the attention given to traditional values, we have supposedly bred a generation who love nothing better than a diet of death, disaster and sex. Perhaps tomorrow's assassins are passively learning the martial arts while sitting quietly at home watching all the punching, poking, prodding and biffing on Bugs Bunny.
As the press and prime minister will readily tell you, there is a correlation between violence on TV and aggression in daily life. So while it is supposedly right and proper for the economic role of the state to be cut back — hospitals closed, government employees laid off and enterprises vended to all comers — the state's role as nanny for the nation's children must increase. Everything — TV, CDs, videos, magazines, the internet — is deserving of scrutiny to ensure that the young are not exposed to this violent contagion.
Reducing the causes of criminal violence in our society to TV and the like is part of foisting blame on specific targets, which are then employed to obscure its real origins. If our society is violent, then the aggressiveness with which individuals treat one another is either the cause or the effect of something more pervasive.
There is a widespread belief that crime is on the increase. Nonetheless, the murder rate, for instance, has been stable for most of this century. Nationwide, of the 321 murders committed over this last year, most were perpetrated at home, and most were committed by someone who knew the victim. Even the 12,809 reported cases of sexual assault were mainly offences occurring most commonly in private homes.
Violence is more likely to emanate from a family member or friend than from some unknown anonymous attacker. Indeed, statistically, it may even be safer to go out at night and mix with strangers than to stay at home with the folks.
Short of murder, has the rate of serious assault increased? Figures released by the Australian Institute of Criminology show that, while some crime rates are stable or declining, your chance of being seriously assaulted has increased five-fold over the past 20 years. In 1974-75, the national rate of serious assault was 21 per 100,000. By 1992-93 the rate had jumped to 133 per 100,000.
These figures are open to interpretation and variations in the level of reporting, but the increase is too significant to be easily dismissed; and most importantly, an increase is what people perceive has occurred.
If violence, in the form of personal assault, is increasing, how are we to explain it?
Not enough police to intervene in disputes? With one copper for every 445.5 Australians, how much supervision did you have in mind?
Maybe the judiciary have been shy and should be jailing more offenders? The jail population in some states is increasing at a rate of over 20% per year. We are now being incarcerated at the rate of 110 per 100,000 — with the indigenous population being jailed much more frequently. In the United States, authorities are building 85,000 extra prison cells each year, and still the crime rate rises.
So how can we explain this shift towards greater violence?
In 1974 — on the eve of the first major recession since the second world war — Australia's working population at least had a job to go to each day. Now, if not jobless, or forced into casual or part-time work, those who are employed recognise that their livelihood may not be so secure. Uncertainty about what tomorrow may bring is the most widespread symptom of life in the 1990s.
Our lot is a pervasive dread, conditioned by the belief that disaster is constantly lurking. With trade union strength in decline, the solidarity of our fellow workers is further broken down by competition for jobs. Greater use of individual contracts further separates employees into individual competing units. It then becomes easier for women or migrants to be blamed for the reduction in employment opportunities. That's what the media do, serviced by the major parties, which seek to obscure the fact that there are simply no jobs.
In these last 10 years, average household income in the country's poorest districts has fallen by more than $7500, compared with a $12,555 jump in that of the richest neighbourhoods. This disparity is the fruit of 13 years of Labor. As Professor Bob Gregory of the Reserve Bank Board admitted to the National Press Club last year: "In 1976 the poor were working on low wages. Now they are poor and jobless."
This dynamic of fewer jobs, greater competition between workers and growing poverty is obvious to everyone, but its consequences are consciously denied by all state and federal governments.
While it seems easy to blame individuals for the violence they commit and thereafter punish them, what the government cannot do so readily is blame a whole generation for the criminal violence to come.
This is where the TV and video furphy is utilised and why mum, dad (or the absence thereof) and teachers are being scolded for failing to instil a sense of civil obedience. The violent spectre that supposedly haunts us is that of the young. We are encouraged to fear the youth because, without either ready job or prospect, maybe they are likely to take out their frustrations on the rest of us.
Without the threat of a current war, impending invasion or communism to shore up the community spirit, the nation is beseeched to unite against violence. Who could object to that lofty aim?
But while violence is presented as something physical — perpetrated oftentimes by young men in daggy pants wearing baseball caps backwards — the real violence goes unpunished. It is violent to wrestle a householder to the ground and steal their VCR, but sacking 30 or 3000 workers is judged as industrial best practice. The vagaries of the economy, the "regrettable" actions of thousands of businesses, are not violent acts against a population but are excused as good common business sense.
For those denied regular employment, society seems somewhat mean and brutish. While the pool of unemployed grows larger, more and more people will be declassed — that is, they will belong to neither of the major contending classes in society. Without jobs, they aren't workers (either formally or as they perceive themselves) and without capital to invest, they can't sign on as bosses.
So individuals become social rejects. Aside from the unemployed's (involuntary) role in forcing wages down by competing for jobs, if society is not interested in utilising your labour, what use are you to it or to anyone else?
But in a remarkable exercise in doublethink, today's economic victims are copping the blame. Condemned for being the author of their own destinies, the unemployed, the partly employed or soon to be redundant are forced to take on full responsibility for their social situation.
Even those in work are assured that unless their performance improves, their job may be the next one axed.
The result of this complex process which drives individuals back on their own meagre resources is social frustration and irritability with their peers. This isn't the way our lives were supposed to be. Caught between what we think we deserve and what we are offered, the strain is relieved by taking it out on someone else (or on ourselves).
Filtered through aspects of gender, age, culture and circumstance, each violent act congeals the totality of the relations in society. If our society is becoming more violent, this is not because individuals have independently generated their own savagery, but because violent acts are the result of the way this society treats all of us. While relations in this society remain capitalist, each one of us is as much a potential victim as we are, given a change in circumstance, a potential agent of physical violence.