Sapphire, you're an Aussie too, right?
I've had interesting discussions about this with my partner. He has this idea that America is just crawling with violent psychopaths. He was actually afraid to have our bedroom window open at night because he was afraid someone would find a way to crawl in (it's too tall for him to get in and he's 6'4").
Anyhow, so just a few weeks ago I went hunting around for crime statistics. I found last year's statistics for the city where we live in the US, and Brisbane, where he is from and where we live part of the time. Interestingly, the number of murders is almost identical. Sexual assaults in Brisbane, however, were TRIPLE the number we had last year than our city in the States. Property crime was higher in Brisbane, as was assault. Drug offenses were higher in the States.
He also likes to recount that we such a large number of people in prison, compared with other countries. I recalled just a couple of pertinent details for him. First, where we live in the States, out of the entire prison population in our state, 77% of the prisoners have committed violent felonies. Secondly, we looked at the actual sentences of people in Australia and learned that, on a whole, they are a LOT shorter than they are here... like 18 mos. for child molestation or rape; 15 years for murder. Our state in the US is a mandatory-minimum state, so when people have committed a certain number of offenses, or have committed an offense past a certain threshold, they are sent to prison for a certain number of years and that's it... they don't get out until that time has passed. That, of course, contributes to more people being in prison overall.
I think the media there has a lot to do with our perceptions of crime. While we are there, I am continually surprised by the amount of coverage events in the US has, particularly violent crime... even most of the shows on TV are American. But then I look in the newspapers and every day I am reading local headlines about a rape or a stabbing or some horrible car accident. I used to joke w/him that all of the Aussie papers read like tabloids, but then I remembered where Rupert Murdoch is from!!
At any rate, I'd say that our killings just seem more frightening because so many people here have guns. It's also why we can have mass killings and it doesn't really happen in Oz (except for that one in Tasmania, after which my beau says that people in Oz voluntarily turned in their guns in droves). I tell him that nearly equal numbers of murders aside, if I had to be murdered I'd rather be shot than stabbed to death... but better than that, I'd rather not be murdered at all.
