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Why do some people drive dangerously?
March/April 2002
"Increasingly, on our congested roads, there has to be an explicit duty of care to other road users whenever we drive any vehicle."
Two research papers, one from Britain and the other from Western Australia, have drawn attention to what little is known about the attitudes and motivations of people who drive dangerously.
The British report is part of a major review on the operation of the country's 10 year-old laws on dangerous driving while the WA report examines patterns and characteristics of the State's repeat drink-driving offenders.
Although the WA report covers only one aspect of dangerous driving, both reports point to a lack of knowledge about the attitudes and motivations of the dangerous driver.
According to the WA researchers who were setting out to determine the arrest patterns and characteristics of repeat drink drivers, insufficient data prevented them from saying much about the behaviour of the offenders.
"The best predictors of repeat arrests for drink-driving were being male, under 20 years of age, having prior arrests, and being Aboriginal," said the WA report.
"These characteristics define a group for whom it may be difficult to define effective countermeasures."
According to the researchers, WA Police make between 10,000 and 12,000 arrests each year for drink driving - one-third of them are repeat offenders.
The UK report described repeat dangerous drivers as "usually male, under 30, with a history of prior arrests for other offences". It also pointed to difficulties with countermeasures.
"Neither imprisonment nor disqualification were found to have much effect on reconviction rates," said the UK report. (In fact this was one of the reasons why the authors found it impossible to determine whether the existing laws on dangerous driving could be judged "successful" or otherwise)
For their analysis the UK researchers used data from 5943 fatal accident files. They found in 44% of fatal accidents the driver at fault was killed and in 20% of cases a pedestrian at fault was killed. Of the remainder, in 10% of the accidents a driver was reported for "Causing Death by Dangerous/Reckless Driving" and in 20% of cases a driver was reported for "Careless Driving".
After analysing data over a ten-year period, the UK researchers found many dangerous drivers who re-offend or began to re-offend did so during their period of disqualification.
"Around one offender in 20 convicted of dangerous driving in 1996 was convicted of a further dangerous driving offence in 1997," they said.
The UK researchers are now planning more research to discover what is in the mind of the dangerous driver.
The idea is to survey drivers convicted of dangerous or careless driving and compare their motivations and attitudes with non-offenders. At the same time the researchers will examine the attitudes of both groups to different types of penalties and the impact those penalties might have.
It is interesting to note that Adam Graycar, director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, also referred to this lack of knowledge in a paper "Criminal Careers and Crime Prevention" presented in Hobart two years ago.
In it he looks particularly at young people and crime and lists dangerous driving in the menu of crimes the young offender was likely to commit.
As he explains, every crime has three ingredients: a motivated offender, a suitable target and an opportunity.
He said there was compelling evidence to suggest that those who feel excluded from participation in community life are more likely to offend against that community. Yet much more needed to be known if counter-measures were to be effective.
"Even though people have been studying young people for a long time there is so much we don't know about criminal careers," said Mr Graycar.
"But it is important to know the answer to a number of key questions if we are going to divert young people away from a life of offending."
