In 2000, Australia had the highest rate of burglary, the highest rate of contact crime (assault, sexual assault and robbery) and the second highest rate of motor vehicle theft among the 25 countries included in the international crime victim survey, which takes in the United States, the United Kingdom and most western European countries. Then in 2001, Australian crime statistics began to decline. By 2018, rates of the most common forms of crime had fallen between 40 and 80 percent and were lower than they'd been in twenty or in some cases thirty years. Australia is not the only country to have experienced this social trend. In The Vanishing Criminal Don Weatherburn and Sara Rahman set out to explain the dramatic fall in crime, rigorously but accessibly comparing competing theories against the available evidence. Their conclusions will surprise many and reshape the terms for discussion of these questions well into the future.

Despite a century of effort, criminologists do not yet fully understand the relationship between disadvantage and crime. The balance of evidence suggests that economic and social stress increase the risk of involvement in crime by increasing the motivation to offend. But there are a number of empirical anomalies that cannot easily be reconciled with this interpretation of the evidence. Weatherburn and Lind argue that the transmission mechanism linking economic and social stress to crime is not offender motivation but disruption to the parenting process. They put forward an epidemic model of the genesis of delinquent-prone communities and show how this model resolves the empirical anomalies facing conventional interpretations of the disadvantage/crime relationship. This book offers compelling evidence which will stimulate debate in this area of criminology and will also interest academics, policy makers and practitioners in the field.

This book challenges the conventional view that disadvantage causes crime because it motivates people to offend. It argues that disadvantage causes crime because it disrupts the parenting process. The theory put forward in the book maintains that it takes a long time for disadvantage to increase the level of crime in a neighborhood. However, once the level of economic and social stress in a neighborhood reaches a critical level, it can set off an epidemic of juvenile offending.