ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to take up the challenge set by Botterill and Jones to get beneath the relationship between tourism and crime. It suggests that in contemporary backpacking form, these enduring motivations interact to reinforce the vulnerability of, at least young backpackers to violent experiences in the NTE. The chapter commences with the presentation of elements selected from a rigorous, substantial and published study into alcohol-related violence in the city of Cairns. Contemporary, illustrative local evidence of the backpacker phenomenon and a multi-agency approach to the governance of security is provided. Retroduction one takes the form of interactions with the relatively enduring motivations, values and practices of backpacking, the hidden sensitivities of tourism stakeholders to the projection of negative destination images, and the turn to plural policing, crime prevention and community safety initiatives as a central plank of government policy response to crime. Criminological treatments focuses the specialist state bureaucracy the police' tasked with law enforcement, crime investigation, public reassurance.
