Professor predicts violent crime to rise in Australia
The West Australian
1 April 2000
A leading Australian criminologist predicts a dramatic rise in violent crimes including armed robberies, rape and Port Arthur style massacres in the years ahead.
In a lecture last night, titled Evil in the New Millennium, a frightening image of the future was painted by Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bond University, Professor Paul Wilson.
"In terms of Australia, we're likely to see far more violent crimes involving armed robbery. You are also going to have more serial violent crimes whether they be rape or murder", he said.
"There is nothing that makes me feel the root causes of violence are going to diminish."
An author of more than 30 books on crime and social issues, Professor Wilson said that one of the major causes of violence in our society is the gap between rich and poor and this division was widening.
"In Australia success is measured in terms of property, cars, consumer goods, and, as a result, concern about building better communities is diminishing," he said.
"A materialistic society puts the emphasis on people having material goods in order to bring happiness and people are going to use violent means to obtain those goods."
Australians should also brace themselves for more incidents like the 1996 Port Arthur massacre when 35 people were gunned down by Martin Bryant.
"It's very difficult to boil that (massacre) down to one simple cause but one thing we can say is that here we had a person who committed a terrible act who was clearly alienated from the society," the professor said.
"He (Bryant) is a classic example of one of the human missiles I am talking about and there are many more of them in Australia who are wandering around...rootless without any anchors to the community at all, who have the potential for committing the most terrible crimes in the future.
"The numbers of these people will increase without any doubt whatsoever." Professor Wilson said that too much money was being spent on prisons and not enough on preventative schemes to overcome bad and neglectful parenting.
"When families are under enormous economic stress and strain, when there is a lack of support for single mothers and other mothers and for families generally, you are going to have a lot more potential killers, rapists and other violent offenders," he said. On the global scale, he predicted more political and ideological violence.
Professor Wilson rejected a popular notion that violence stemmed from television, movies and video games.
"Social forces and religious and nationalistic ideology are far more likely to lead to evil than films and television," he said.
Professor Wilson's latest book, Tandem Killers, a study of killers who act in pairs, is scheduled for release later this year. AAP
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