Long-term trends in metropolitan development and sexual assault rates

¶ … Metropolitan Development Affect Rates of Sexual Assault

As the population continues to grow, more and more people are finding themselves living closer to their neighbors. People are crowded into cities, and some areas are being revitalized and upgraded in an attempt to get more people moving back into them. This is not being done to mitigate the overcrowding, though, but to give even more people who want to come into the city a place to live. What a lot of people do not realize is how much of an effect this has on the people who are ending up packed in close with one another. Tempers can flare, and the incidence of violent crime can rise. These crimes include murder, gang violence, muggings and robberies, and sexual assaults, as well as standard assaults.

The issue addressed here will be sexual assault, since it is the one that is most overlooked by the majority of people. They often do not think much about the kinds of problems that can be faced by putting people who are interested in activities of a criminal nature in with the people who could become their victims. Of course, there is no way to completely avoid this. However, that does not mean that there is nothing that can be done or that people should not be aware of this kind of issue. Being aware of problems allows people to focus on them and find ways to cope with them, so that they can be reduced.

It also allows those who are working on gentrification and urban revitalization to think about the ways they are going about this, in order to discourage criminals from moving into the neighborhoods that are being created. The cost of the housing, the quality of the area, the number of streetlights, and other issues that are controllable are all part of keeping crime down in any neighborhood. In order to understand why urban revitalization and gentrification are so important when it comes to the rates of sexual assault in metropolitan development, a little information about how this development takes place -- and what drives people to commit these kinds of crimes -- is necessary.

Many of the people who commit violent crimes like sexual assault do so because they have been 'damaged' when they were younger by crimes against them or against those they loved. Others have mental problems that they are not being correctly treated for. Often, they are not being treated at all, will not seek help, or have stopped taking their medication. Anyone who lives with chronic mental illnesses or problems can be difficult to handle and work with, and those people often commit crimes and then claim that they did not understand right from wrong (Lewis, Yeager, Swica, Pincus, & Lewis, 1997). Those people who are trained to treat these kinds of illnesses often have a hard time doing their jobs, especially when real progress is impeded by jail time, treatments, or other issues.

That is a problem, because people who have mental illness that causes them to commit crimes need treatment. If they do not get that treatment, they are going to commit more crimes when they are released from prison. If they were sexual offenders in the past, there is a serious concern that they will still be sexual offenders in the future. When they move into urban revitalization areas, there are more opportunities for them to commit crimes against people, simply because there are more people around. They see more targets, and this puts people at risk for dangers that they might not have otherwise thought much about. As society continues to develop, the rates of sex crimes and other types of assaults in urban areas go up (Miller, McClusky-Fawcett, & Irving, 1993; Noll, 2003; Coons, 1994)

How best to treat the people who commit these crimes and stop the pattern from continuing becomes a real concern, the more closely packed a neighborhood or a city becomes. A critique of the psychiatric model shows emotional problems which stem from abuse or other issues are viewed as though they were diseases (Lewis, et al., 1997). However, it is believed that there are flaws in that argument, because there are two things about emotional problems that are specifically avoided in that discussion -- these are that illnesses have a cure and emotional problems depend on biological characteristics (Lewis, et al., 1997; Silberg, 2004; Rodriguez-Svednick, 2001).

The issue with those two assumptions is that they do not look at the entire picture when examining a person for suspected problems such as abuse or emotional difficulties. They look at specific symptoms, and if the symptoms the person displays fit into a category of illness, that person is assumed to have the illness. They see that person as treatable, but they do not see the environment the person comes from or is going back to. Factors such as what is going on in a person's family life or what his social interactions are like are generally not considered on an individual basis (Lewis, et al., 1997). However, with issues such as sexual assault, social interactions and family life are both vitally important to an understanding of what has taken place in a person's life in the past and how any trauma from it may have manifested itself in the present, as well as how this trauma may appear in the person's life in the future (Lewis, et al., 1997).

In other words, finding the root cause of what makes these people commit sexual crimes is one of the ways that the number of crimes being committed can be lowered. When there are fewer criminals, the idea that people are living closer to one another because of urban revitalization and other programs is not as much of a concern for the residents. The people will not have to live in fear of their neighbors, and they will have safe streets, parks, walking paths, and other areas where they can enjoy their areas and not be concerned about whether they will be harmed by someone else. Of course, even the safest neighborhood can have problems. There are always people who will hurt others. More and more of them seem to congregate in the downtown areas, though, and in the areas where urban revitalization has not yet taken place. Once neighborhoods start to improve, these people are often pushed out and the individuals who work and live in the newly-revitalized areas feel safer and have fewer problems with crime.

Human behavior is varied and complex, and there is no way to actually put something into a particular category 100% of the time. Each human being is different, and would react differently to situations (Lewis, et al., 1997). That is important to remember, because not all of the people who commit crimes like sexual assault do so because they were traumatized when they were young or because they have some type of mental problem that they are not being treated correctly for. Some of them commit crimes for other reasons. Sexual assault, for example, is often not really about sex, but about holding power over another person. That is important to be aware of when planning a community revitalization project, since areas where people can be easily targeted or singled out should largely be avoided. Bigger, more open areas are a much safer proposition.

Cities that realize this are doing better when it comes to lowering the number of sexual assaults that they see in their downtown areas. Urban revitalization and gentrification can only go so far toward stopping these crimes, but the same is also true of seeing these criminals as ill or in need of help. While diagnostic tests can find and assist some of the people who commit sexual assaults, the vast majority of these kinds of criminals cannot be helped this way and/or will not be interested in seeking help, seeing a therapist, or remaining on medication to help them through whatever they might be dealing with (Chu, 1990; Finkelhor, 1990; Jarvis & Copeland, 1997; Romans, 1995). Because of that, the way that cities are redesigning themselves to make themselves safer for the residents may be, by far, the best defense against crimes like sexual assault, which generally happen in out-of-the-way areas where it is easy to get a victim alone and where others will not see or hear.