Bulletin

Issue: July/August 2007

News

The structure of violence

Minor acts underpin a pyramid of community violence, says La Trobe researcher Rae Walker.

Research from Bogata – one of the most violent communities in the world – is being used by La Trobe University to help visualise the prevalence of community violence here. ‘Researchers in Columbia looked at violence as an interpersonal issue in communities,’ says Associate Professor Rae Walker, of the School of Public Health.

‘They did a communitybased survey that looked at people’s experience of a range of acts from shouting and throwing things to lethal acts of violence. What emerged was a pyramid with low-level acts that most people had experienced at the bottom. At the top of the pyramid were the mortal acts which very few people had witnessed or experienced. These are relatively rare.’

Professor Walker says there are links between the levels but it is difficult to demonstrate how the connections work. She leads a team of researchers and service providers who have applied for funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council to try and understand the structure of violence in two local communities. If the grant is successful, they will survey 500 households in each of the municipalities of Whittlesea and Nillumbik.

‘A variety of studies suggest that it is worthwhile trying to understand the big picture,’ Professor Walker says. ‘For planners this means being able to conceptualise violence at the community level rather than focusing on, for example, the tiny proportion of episodes that end up with police.

‘Local government has been telling us that they are keen to base their programs on evidence. One thing is clear. They don’t know how common violence is because virtually all research is based on random samples of a population segment such as women, or on or data collected for other purposes such as police data. We do not have data about violence in an actual community.’

Partnership is Professor Walker’s research speciality. She is building pathways between university research and the people in the front line.

The latest project builds on a collaborative project funded by a $25,000 Discovery Grant from VicHealth which assisted Whittlesea City Council to map services in the municipality, run a forum on the issue and strengthen its activities to enhance community safety.

As a result, Professor Walker was approached by Victoria Police to assist them get offenders out of the justice system and into health care.

The ultimate aim of the work is to develop means of violence prevention. It may be possible, Professor Walker says, to find points of intervention in the pyramid of violent acts to prevent violence progressing to the stage where the police need to become involved.

In Bogata a number of prevention programs have had extraordinary success, she says. These have focused on public transport, the design of neighbourhoods and city-wide interventions such as experimenting with periods of time in which men are banned from the streets to prevent women from being molested.

Professor Walker is not suggesting that Melbourne is on a par with Bogata in terms of violence. She is interested in the broad, communitybased approach taken in that city.

‘I want to find out how the interpersonal pyramid is experienced in communities here,’ she says.

Violence is a complex issue.

‘It is not only an interpersonal issue,’ Professor Walker says. ‘Self-harm and collective violence are also important. To understand the phenomenon of violence we need to understand it better at multiple levels – violence against oneself, violence towards other people and violence perpetrated by the institutions of society on the community.

‘Each level interacts with the others. The least studied level is collective violence, such as the impact of refugee policy. In the future this level needs to be studied more closely.’