Guardianship in the Brisbane Suburbs: An Exploratory Study of Crime Control by Residents in a Non-Urban Context

Abstract

Within the routine activity approach (Cohen & Felson, 1979) guardianship is argued to be a critical component of crime prevention. Guardians are defined as ordinary citizens who carry out supervision, which helps prevent or deter crime. Traditionally, criminological research has used measures that approximate levels of household occupancy to examine the relationship between guardianship and crime. More recently, however, Reynald (2009) developed the Guardianship in Action (GIA) model. The GIA model proposes a valid way to directly observe residents’ guardianship behaviour, and understand the spatio-physical and socio-demographic factors that facilitate crime control behaviour by residents. Observations using the GIA model have thus far been applied in urban residential environments in The Hague, Netherlands (Reynald, 2009; Reynald, 2011a) and Boston, Massachusetts (Hollis-Peel, Reynald, & Welsh, 2012; Hollis-Peel & Welsh, 2014). These studies limited observations to weekdays. Collectively, The Hague and Boston studies show that the GIA model is an ecologically valid method to observe guardianship behaviour. Further, this research shows how different environmental and social factors help to facilitate or inhibit guardianship across high density, urban contexts. This thesis builds on these existing studies by applying GIA in Australia for the first time, and by testing the model for the first time in a suburban residential context.