The Sunday Age, with the assistance of Deakin University criminologist Ian Warren, attempted to test whether Melbourne really was violent, or comparatively safe. The truth appears to be mixed - and occasionally surprising. Compared with New York City, a city of 8 million, Melbourne - on a per-100,000 of the population basis - has more than twice the reported rapes, about a third the number of robberies and roughly two-thirds the number of homicides. Melbourne has high levels of sexual assault, a disturbing revelation that might have a bright side. ''I wouldn't feel that was a black mark against Victoria,'' says Associate Professor Mary Heath, who teaches criminal law at Flinders University. ''It means that people have the confidence to go and come forward.'' Compared with Washington or Cincinnati - cities racked with racial poverty and violence - Melbourne does much better. Alternatively, parts of those cities are out of control. The Sunday Age compared Melbourne with six cities roughly akin to our own: middle-class, mixed industry, healthy school attendance and where there is an everyday expectation of walking the street safely. The cities are Vancouver (rated the world's most liveable city by The Economist's Economist Intelligence Unit), Seattle, San Diego, Denver, Cardiff and Leeds, which might be regarded as being on the rougher end of the scale. Again, the picture was mixed. Melbourne reported significantly higher rates of sexual assault than Vancouver, Leeds, Cardiff and Cambridge, and higher rape figures than San Diego and Seattle. The good news was that it reported lower robbery rates than all of them, lower assault rates than Vancouver, but a higher rate than Denver.

For homicide, Melbourne's rates were higher than Vancouver, about the same as San Diego and a little less than Seattle. The results suggest Melbourne does well in some areas and woefully in others. But it is an incomplete picture - and represents the difficulty for anyone, including criminologists, to attain reliable comparisons. Different cities record statistics differently - for example, San Diego and Seattle record aggravated assaults but not a total number of assaults. They also record rape but not a total number of sexual assaults. As Dr Warren says: ''There is always going to be some glitch in the comparability - based on different legal definitions of crime in different jurisdictions. We have this to some extent in Australia anyway, given the different laws between states, but it is more pronounced when doing global comparisons.'' In its 2008 report Trends in Violent Crime, the Australian Institute of Criminology noted that ''homicide is often used as a gauge of the level of violence in society'' - because there is no gap between crimes reported to police and what's talked about in victimisation surveys. The victims can be counted at the morgue. Overall, the US has about double our per capita homicide rate, Dr Warren says. ''This is partially due to their firearms laws and availability, and partially due to other social factors such as race, poverty and lack of public amenity.'' But if we look at Europe, we can't feel quite so pleased with ourselves.

According to British Home Office figures that compare homicide rates in 15 European countries, averaged out over three years between 2005 and 2008, Victoria scored significantly higher than all of them - from nearly twice as high as Finland to 3½ times higher than Austria and Germany. Says Dr Warren: ''There is a lot of speculation as to why Europe has these lower rates: lower availability of firearms, weather, differential law enforcement approaches, physical clustering in urban areas, or any number of guesses, which are all open to more criminological research.'' ''Ultimately, we know very little about why one city or state might be more or less violent than another …'' Dr Warren says the research required is of an anthropological nature - looking for differences between tribes, so to speak. ''The trick is to work out what's going on in Austria [with its comparably low murder rate] and what's going on here and pinpoint the differences … which gets down to using cross-cultural methods. How do we define what the cultural differences are? This is an anthropological question.'' There is no question that violent assault is increasing and causing more severe injuries. According to police figures, 33,668 assaults were reported in Victoria in 2008-09 - 5.4 per cent up on the previous year - and nearly 23,000 of them took place in Melbourne. A six-year study using data from the Victorian State Trauma Registry found the number of people with assault-related major trauma admitted to Victorian hospitals nearly tripled between 2001 and 2007.

The study found more than 90 per cent of patients were men and more than half were younger than 35. Serious head injury was a common outcome of assault, with 82 per cent of patients who had blunt trauma having a serious head injury. Running tandem to this increase in assault-related trauma has been an increase in the number of group assaults. Says Dr Warren: ''This might mean there is a changing ethic to the way men deal with violence in Australia. We need more research on the dynamics of collective violence to make sense of this problem, but it seems serious assaults are becoming more vicious, and the willingness of young men to act in groups rather than one-on-one might provide clues in explaining this trend.'' There are two popular theories as to why there has been a rise in street assault instigated by people aged 15 to 25. Some say exposure to violent video games is the main cause; others argue the culprit is alcohol.

Dr Warren says there isn't enough research to prove the video game theory, and he doesn't accept it ''as the dominant cause of much public violence in Melbourne at the moment''. ''It might have some bearing, but there are a lot of young men who engage in violence who don't interact with violent media at all, while others who do are too busy playing violent video games to be going to pubs and clubs and committing real acts of violence.'' The alcohol issue, he says, is more complex. ''Per capita booze consumption in a place like Germany [with its much lower homicide rate] is almost double [that in] Australia, yet the assault rate is close to half. The way we've collapsed the relationship between alcohol and violence has the potential to misconstrue the relationship. We're saying alcohol equals violence, which isn't always going to be the case. Alcohol might play a circumstantial role … but in continually emphasising the connection, we're missing the point. Something else is going on. It's time to investigate what that something else is.'' Deputy Commissioner Ken Jones agrees. He says Victoria is more culturally aligned with Britain, which ''was always held up as an example of a culture that couldn't manage alcohol very well''. Professor Paul Wilson, a criminologist and forensic psychologist from Bond University, says Australia has, by any standards, an extraordinarily high rate of youthful assaults.

''It has been a consistently high rate for 20 years. That is symptomatic, more than anything else of a cultural phenomenon in Australia, and a disturbing one where young males see drinking and fighting as a mark of their masculinity. ''I would contrast that with Japan, where heavy drinking also happens, but the … violence that is associated with it is minimal. It is a cultural aspect. Heavy drinking by itself does not necessarily lead to violence but the cause that is associated culturally here is with showing how tough you are and masculine you are by fighting.'' Professor Wilson says that what is happening on the streets is spilling over into schoolyards, guaranteeing that what is happening culturally will be further embedded. ''A lot of the recent discussions about the knifings and the bullying and fights in schoolyards reflects to some extent what is going on out there in the community generally.'' University of Technology Sydney anthropologist Jonathan Marshall says police figures suggest there is a difference in the culture of Sydney and Melbourne, ''although, to be sure, you would want to see if this was replicated over the years. You are more likely to be killed in Melbourne and raped and robbed in Sydney. At a trite level this sounds plausible - after all, Sydney very much has a culture of taking what you want.'' Sydney University anthropologist Stephen Juan believes the crime statistics or even the actual crime rate is less damaging to the public psyche than ''the toxic psychological impact'' of the perception that crime is getting worse and our communities are unsafe.

''This brings about fear and anxiety leading to mental health problems, substance abuse, family breakdown, demands for expensive and oppressive security measures which replace one set of anxieties for another, and ironically, more crime. Humans do not choose well, act well, or live well in a state of fear.'' Loading The state government, mindful of an election this year in which law and order is likely to be a critical issue, recently named Justin Madden as the Minister for Respect Agenda. It is a mimicking of UK policy, a somewhat feel-good move designed to solve the street-violence problem by encouraging self-respect among potentially violent drunks. How this is to be achieved is yet to be made clear.