Australian Violence

Almost three decades have passed since a series of gun massacres shocked the nation and led to a major inquiry into Australian violence. Its ground breaking report unveiled the centrality of violence in our history and society - violence that commonly occurs in the routines and practices of everyday life - and the failings of the criminal justice system to deal with much of it.

Australian Violence reflects shifts in our understanding of violence and debates issues surrounding it. It offers contemporary analyses of violence in the lives of women and girls, male drinking violence, prison violence, gun debates and gun-owning culture, and more recent concerns with hate crime, rural crime, harm directed at animals, risky and 'dangerous' offenders, and borders and detention, as well as new forms of community prevention and alternative criminal justice. It acknowledges state violence in Australia's history and present, in the dispossession of Indigenous people and the denial of Indigenous knowledge, and the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The book engages with international theory, research and practice but also offers a distinctive Australian approach that considers what it means to be a settler nation in the global south.

The authors include scholars and researchers who have led critical study and national debates about these topics and perspectives on violence.