Boys and road rage: driving-related violence and aggression in Western Australia.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Published date: 01 December 2005
• Author: Roberts, Lynne,Indermaur, David
• Author: Roberts, Lynne
• Date: 01 December 2005

This article reports on the results of a population survey of 1208 West Australian drivers designed to measure the prevalence of driving-related violence and aggression as well as perceptions of these behaviours. A clear distinction is made between driving-related violence (restricted to criminal acts of violence, threats of violence and vehicle damage) and other aggressive driving behaviours. Although the majority of survey respondents had experienced some form of aggressive driving behaviour, only 13% reported ever being a victim of driving-related violence. However, 17% of respondents believed they were likely, or very likely, to be a victim of driving-related violence within the coming year. More than two thirds of respondents thought their likelihood of being a victim of driving-related violence had increased over the past 10 years. Both aggressive driving behaviours and driving-related violence were typically perpetrated by young males against other males. The article concludes with a discussion of the masculinist characteristics of road rage and what this implies for the prevention of this crime.

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Road rage is a term that has come into common use over the past decade. It is used broadly and imprecisely to refer to a range of driving-related behaviours and experiences. Behaviours that have been included range from verbal abuse, gestures and horn-honking through aggressive driving practices to threats, assaults and, in extreme cases, murder. Only the most serious end of this spectrum, those incidents resulting in violence or threats of violence, constitute criminal acts. However, in this article we use the term as it is generally understood to refer to both aggressive as well as violent driving-related behaviours.

Road rage has received considerable media attention across the western world over the last decade (Lupton, 2001; Marshall & Thomas, 2002; Roberts & Indermaur, 2003b; Smart & Mann, 2002). It is not unusual to find the term road rage associated with sensational allusions such as 'exploding phenomenon', 'plague' and 'epidemic' (Glassner, 1999). Despite the media interest, limited research has been conducted to establish the prevalence of behaviours referred to as road rage.

The research that has been conducted has primarily focused on the less serious end of the road rage continuum, such as verbal abuse, obscene gestures and horn-honking. The major aim of this article is to establish the self-reported prevalence of road rage, both in terms of those acts that could be classed as a form of criminal violence and also those driving behaviours that involve anger and/or aggression but are not crimes. A secondary aim of this article is to explore public perceptions of these behaviours.

Preliminary endeavours to establish the prevalence of road rage behaviours have typically employed a survey methodology. In Britain, three questions on aggressive driving behaviours were included in a supplement to the 1998 British Crime Survey (Mirrlees-Black, Budd, Partridge, & Mayhew, 1998) (1) The majority (52%) of the 4565 respondents reported experiencing verbal abuse or gestures from other drivers in the previous 12 months. A small proportion (3%) of respondents reported that they had been threatened with violence by another driver but almost one in 10 (9%) indicated that they had been forced to pull over or were forced off the road during this same time span (Marshall & Thomas, 2000).

Smart, Mann and Studoto (2003) employed a telephone survey to establish the 12-month self-reported prevalence of victimisation and perpetration of road rage in Ontario, Canada. Nearly half (47%) of the 1395 survey respondents reported being the victim, or being with someone else who was the victim, of shouting, cursing or rude gestures by someone in another vehicle over a 12-month period. Almost a third of respondents (32%) reported perpetrating these activities. Over the same period 7% reported being the victim, or being with someone else who was the victim, of driving-related violence. However, only 2% of survey respondents admitted to perpetrating such violence.

Population surveys have also been conducted within Australia to establish the prevalence of driving-related violence and aggressive driving (AAMI, 2003; Roy Morgan Research Centre, 1996; Victorian Community Council Against Violence, 1999). In addition, further Australian research (Cameron, Bartholomaeus, Lee, Xiao, & Hocking, 1999; Mayhew & Quinlan, 2001) has examined self-reports of victimisation in nonrepresentative subpopulations. The salient details of the Australian studies are summarised in Table 1. While the prevalence estimates vary widely, surveys typically reveal a high prevalence of victimisation for aggressive driving behaviours but a much lower prevalence of driving-related violent acts.

The survey research conducted to date has been subject to a number of limitations. First, the sample sizes have generally been inadequate to produce reliable estimates for the population or subpopulations. Second, many of the surveys focused on aggressive road rage behaviours to the exclusion of criminal driving-related violence (e.g., Marshall & Thomas, 2000; Smart et al., 2003). Third, comparing across studies is difficult given the differing time periods (e.g., lifetime vs. 1-year prevalence) and the differing groupings of road rage behaviours (e.g. the reporting of multiple behaviours in one category in some studies vs. individual behaviours in others). In addition, differing definitions of victims (respondent only vs. any occupant in the vehicle) were used across surveys. Where surveys include people other than the individual respondent as victims the prevalence rates will obviously be much higher. Finally, not all studies have clearly established the abuse or threats as being driving-related. For example, Smart et al. (2003) simply prefaced their questions about behaviours with 'Now some questions about things that might have happened when you are driving or a passenger in a car, van, truck or motorcycle'. With such a wide definition it is quite possible that incidents that are not generally considered road rage (e.g., continuing disputes between familiars) may have been included in the prevalence estimates. The issue of the definition of road rage clearly affects efforts to measure the phenomenon and thus is a matter of primary importance.

Harding, Morgan, Indermaur, Ferrante and Blagg (1998) developed a highly specific definition of criminal road rage as 'impulsive driving related violence between strangers' (p. 224). Their research sought to establish the prevalence of such incidents recorded by the West Australian police during the 5-year period from 1991 to 1995 and was extended by Roberts and Indermaur (2003a) to cover the period from 1996 to 2000.

Prevalence was established using a two-stage process: computer-based offence selection followed by manual sorting. First, all police offence records for physical assaults, threats and driving causing death or bodily harm occurring between 1991 and 2000 in the Offence Information System of the Western Australian Police Force were filtered by a computer program that selected only those offences that occurred between strangers in a street, road, vehicle or car park. The narrative sections of the 19,979 selected offence records were then reviewed to determine whether the violence involved was indeed spontaneous and driving-related. (2) Cases where insufficient information was available or where the nature of the assault was ambiguous were excluded. The review reduced the set to 2201 incidents that could be labelled driving-related assaults or threats.

Roberts and Indermaur (2003a) reported that the number of incidents of driving-related assaults and threats per 100,000 vehicles increased over the 10 years from 1991 to 2000. However, when these incidents were considered as a subset of all stranger assaults, which is the most appropriate traditional categorisation for this type of assault, the apparent increase disappeared. As a percentage of all street assaults by strangers reported to the police, road rage incidents remained at a constant (between 10% to 11%) over the 10-year period (Roberts & Indermaur, 2003a). In other words, driving-related street assaults between strangers had not increased any more than other stranger street assaults. It was argued that the increase in recorded road rage incidents (and stranger assaults generally) may have been a function of the greater likelihood of reporting and police recording of such reports rather than any real change in the risks of this behaviour.

There were two major limitations of this previous research in establishing the prevalence of road rage. First, it excluded all cases of road rage not reported to, or recorded by, the police. As the likelihood of road rage offences being reported to the police has not been established, it is not possible to estimate the true prevalence of criminal road rage acts from police reports. Second, in contrast to the survey research, this research had an exclusive focus on road rage as criminal acts.

In this article, we aim to extend and overcome some of the limitations of previous research by reporting the findings of a population survey designed to measure the prevalence of driving-related violence and aggression and public perceptions of road rage.

Method

A population survey of West Australian adult drivers was conducted using Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI). A random sample of households stratified by metropolitan/nonmetropolitan area was drawn from an electronic version of the White Pages telephone directory for Western Australia) In each household contacted, the interviewer asked to speak to the youngest male driver aged over 18 years. (4) If nobody met this criterion, random sampling (based on last birthday) was used to select a driver from the household. A policy of no replacements within the...