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CRIME IN RURAL COMMUNITIES 313

places which fell into the same clusters LGAs in New South Wales (Jobes et al.,
showed similar crime profiles. 2004), especially for the more rural cluster,
Wells and Weisheit (2004) conducted a the fifth cluster, which had a declining
similar county-level analysis in the USA, but population.
included both non-metropolitan and metro- The research reviewed above, and other
politan counties, and official crime rate data work focused on rural crime that implicitly
(i.e., Uniform Crime Reports of the FBI). or explicitly adopts a social disorganization
Their results were similar to those of Jobes framework or logic, have identified five
et al. (2004). Economic variables were primary sets of factors that combine to create
inversely related to both property and violent particular types of rural communities with
crime rates in metropolitan counties, but had specific profiles of crimes.
only weak effects for the non-metropolitan
counties. They concluded that the mix of
similar and dissimilar results when compar- Proximity
ing metropolitan and non-metropolitan
county crime rates with various social and By their nature, rural places have smaller
economic indicators suggests ‘using more populations and lower population densities.
than one causal model to explain crime in Wilkinson (1984b) was among the first
both settings’(Wells and Weisheit, 2004: 17). authors to suggest that rural communities
Osgood and Chambers (2000) examined exhibit considerable variability in rates of
rural youth violence within non-metropolitan crime because of their smaller populations.
counties of four USA states of the South and By itself, size is meaningless, but small size
Midwest. Like the findings of Jobes et al., interacting with other factors creates unique
(2004), their results demonstrated a non- contexts in which both law-abiding and crim-
linear relationship between the population inal behaviours, as defined by the norms and
size of non-metropolitan counties and violent laws of a society, are expressed. Rural com-
crime arrest rates among juveniles. They con- munities proximate to large, urban centres,
cluded that ‘per capita rates of juvenile arrest and rural communities that experience rapid
for violent crimes are significantly and economic and population change (both
consistently associated with residential insta- growth and decline) are examples of places
bility, family disruption, and ethnic hetero- in which crime can increase rapidly. The spe-
geneity’ (Osgood and Chambers, 2000: 106). cific sources can include the relocation of
Further, family was a ‘critical element’, that factories, military bases, energy develop-
is, areas where adults were ‘actively engaged ment, tourism and other forms of economic
in parental roles ... bring formal and informal gain and loss (Freudenburg and Jones, 1991;
controls to bear on the behaviour of children Wilkinson, 1984a). Further, many of these
throughout the community’ (Osgood and economic activities exploit rural people
Chambers, 2000: 106). Moreover, poverty through directives emanating from urban-
and delinquency did not exhibit the same located headquarters.
kind of relationship as urban-based social
disorganization theory would have predicted.
Osgood and Chambers (2000) suggest that Poverty
this is because the ethnic homogeneity of
rural places in their study correlated with Rural communities that manifest higher than
poverty and residential instability, whereas average rates of poverty also possess fewer
many urban places would find ethnic hetero- resources to support institutions, such as
geneity related to both. In other words, schools, which promote pro-social behaviour
Osgood and Chambers’ (2000) results from (Oetting et al., 1998). In some situations,
the USA echo the cluster analysis of rural poverty may act as a protective factor against