SUMMARY
Survey respondents were asked questions relating to their perceptions and opinions about social disorder problems in their local area. Social disorder includes antisocial behaviour and refers to issues which may or may not be criminal offences such as public drunkenness, noisy neighbours and offensive language or behaviour.
Overall, approximately 61% of people aged 18 years and over perceived that their local area had at least one social disorder issue. Of all the states and territories, the Northern Territory (28%) and Western Australia (32%) had the lowest percentage of people reporting no social disorder concerns.
Noisy driving was the most commonly reported type of social disorder in Australia, with an estimated 6 million people (36%) stating it was an issue in their local area, closely followed by dangerous driving (5.8 million people, 35%).
Respondents were asked whether the social disorder issues they identified as a problem in their local area were large, moderate or small problems. Approximately one-third of people indicated at least one of the problems was large. While the use or dealing of drugs in the local area was the least commonly reported of the specified social disorder issues (8.1%), 32% of these people believed it to be a large problem.
For those reporting large or moderate social disorder issues, personal experience was the greatest influence on respondents' opinions on the issue (98%), followed by the experience of someone else known to the respondent (23%) and information from the media (15%).
SOCIAL DISORDER ISSUES
![Graph: SOCIAL DISORDER ISSUES](/ausstats/abs@.nsf/91f72cb52e908514ca25709f0000a6a8/f48468a5836e324bca257839000d6ce2/Body/0.898!OpenElement&FieldElemFormat=gif)