Australia Most Violent And Getting Worse

“That’s the basic picture in Australia at the moment – we’re getting more violent,” Dr Tim Prenzler, head of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University told SMH. “It’s not a pretty picture.” There were 145,420 violent crimes in 1996. By 2002, the figure had grown to 198,722 – and 80 per cent were assaults. In the UN survey about 30 per cent of those surveyed told researchers they had been victimised one or more times in 1999, compared with 26 per cent in England and Wales, 21 per cent in the US and 15 per cent in Japan. Meanwhile England and Wales had the highest incidence of overall crime, the survey showed.