By Jude McCulloch
Between the mid-'60s and the mid-'80s, state government spending on police increased 172% — compared to a 41% increase for housing and community amenities. While stringent economic conditions have led to large cutbacks in areas such as education, police budgets have continued to increase.
Conservative politicians find it profitable to play on and inspire fear of crime. The authoritarian attitudes of conservative parties fit well with the rhetoric of "law and order". Kel Glare, Victoria's chief commissioner of police, laments the "lessening of authority" and "respect for all institutions". The breakdown of "law and order", seen as represented by increasing crime statistics, is equated with the breakdown of discipline and traditional values.
It is clear police have used crime statistics for political purposes. When the police wanted a new law that gave them greater powers in relation to weapons such as knives, they produced figures that showed that knife attacks had increased dramatically. Independent research by the Victorian Law Reform Commission found that there had been no such increase.
Police charging patterns influence crime statistics. The incidence of assault police charges increased dramatically in New South Wales with changes to occupational health and safety laws that made it advantageous for police to record such charges.
Reporting rates also influence crime statistics. The increasing tendency of people to have household insurance and programs like Neighbourhood Watch make it more likely that people will report burglaries. It is well known that women frequently do not report crimes of violence committed against them. Even if they do, police frequently fail to perceive or report such incidents as crime.
In a society divided by race, class and gender, only those activities which are seen to harm the collective interests of white middle-class men are defined and treated as crimes. Activities which have no victim, such as prostitution, drug use and homosexuality, are from time to time criminalised. Rape is a crime but not necessarily if the perpetrator is the husband of the victim.
There are about 200 workplace deaths, many resulting from unlawful work practices, compared to about 70 homicides, in Victoria each year. The latter are treated as crimes, the former are not.
Crimes against women
In the most recent annual report by Victorian police, the number of serious assaults, particularly against women, is listed as an issue of concern to the public. Testimony from women who have been raped has been used to assist police in their campaigns for increased powers. One is on the side of the woman and the police or of the rapist.
In recent times attacks on women in public places such as parks and car parks have received particular prominence. This emphasis obscures rimes of violence against women are committed by men they know.
The family is the predominant setting for violence. The victims of family violence are women and children. Highlighting rapes in public places feeds the myth that rapists are working class. The image of the man in the car park is not one of a man in a suit, yet doctors and businessmen also rape.
Reports of attacks on women in public places are not designed to inform but to scare us. The publicity underwrites the notion that the streets are unsafe for"respectable women" and the notion that public space is male. Women who exercise their right to freedom of movement are seen as "asking for it".
To inform women that there is no typical rapist would simply not be good for business. To have us too scared to travel the streets alone is one thing, to have us refusing to work for or with men would be quite another.
Policing
Police response to crimes against women is underpinned by the misogynist notion that, if women are hurt, then they are probably guilty of something themselves. The man who habitually beats the woman he lives with is not described by police as a career criminal.
If called upon to assist a woman being assaulted by a man, police will respond according to the relationship of the perpetrator to the victim, rather than to the seriousness of the violence. It is the male aggressor who decides whether or not there is a relationship; the fact that there is violence is enough to convince many officers that there is a relationship, because many see violence as a normal part of male-female relationships.
Women victims are frequently perceived as hysterical and mentally unstable. The violence against women in domestic violence situations is then trivialised, and the officers frequently identify with the men.
Women attacked by men they don't know may also be viewed as asking for it or liking it, but added into the police response is the notion that the woman may be some other man's property. If the woman belongs to another man, then the crime takes on a greater seriousness because of the violation of the man's property rights.
The rape of a white woman by a black man is considered a more serious crime because white women belong to white men. Black women, according to the racist mind set, also belong to white men, and so their rape is permitted.
When it comes to domestic violence, police suddenly gain a perspective which is lacking in other areas of law enforcement. It is said that arrest will not solve the problem because the violence arises out of complex social factors. This is true in all areas of law enforcement, yet the police enforce other laws.
Criminal assault in the home is seen as a private matter, but police are not coy about enforcing other laws, such as laws against drug use, prostitution and homosexuality, that belong in the private realm.
Police failure to enforce the law against assault when men and women are living together or in a relationship endangers women's lives. More than a third of all murders are committed by a relative of the victim, and in about half of spouse killings there has been at least one prior incident of physical abuse.
Control
Female victims of rape cannot depend on police assistance or sympathy. It is well know that the police treat with suspicion women's reports of rape. The now disbanded Police Complaints Authority in Victoria undertook a study on police response to victims of sexual assault.
One woman who had been savagely assaulted by four men and hospitalised as a result was persuaded to leave her hospital bed and go to police headquarters. On hearing her account, the police did not believe that she had been raped but discovered that there were warrants for her arrest for unpaid parking fines. She was taken directly to police cells to serve her time.
The illegality of prostitution gives police control over large numbers of women. When the NSW government in the late '70s decriminalised prostitution, the Police Association took out full-page ads in daily papers asserting they had been robbed of their power to control criminality on the streets.
In most states the laws against prostitution criminalise only those who work as prostitutes and not their customers. Where there are laws that make it an offence to be a prostitute's client, generally the police have not been enthusiastic about enforcing the law.
Women who work as prostitutes are seen as legitimate targets of male violence. Frequently assaulted and raped, they are provided with no police protection.
Custody
One in four people arrested is female. Aboriginal women are massively over-represented among women who are arrested.
Apart from psychological and physical abuse in police custody, women are almost always subject to abuse of a sexual nature. The very fact that the overwhelming majority of police officers are male puts women in a vulnerable position in custody. The inquiry into racist violence heard that Aboriginal women were physically abused by police, raped and threatened with rape.
The number of women arrested underestimates the magnitude of intervention in women's lives. Seeking information about offences committed by men, police regularly question women whom they do not arrest or charge. Women are often threatened with harm if they do not cooperate; a recurring theme is the threat to take women's children away from them.
The rhetoric of law and order is protection; the reality is control. This is an old lesson. We are promised protection inside relationships with men and within the home, but what we get is control. Police are at best the men who stand by and cheer as we are beaten and raped, at he rapists.
[This is an abridged version of a paper presented to the Women and Law Conference convened by the Australian Institute of Criminology in Sydney in September.]