Crime and Safety in Rural Contexts: Innovative Methods

Abstract

Lower crime rates in sparsely populated areas of the globe are often taken as a sign that crime is not a major concern in these areas. The negligence of safety and security issues outside the urban realm is not exclusive to criminology. Such paucity of knowledge on crime, victimization, and safety conditions in rural contexts can be associated with the inadequacy of reliable official data and/or the lack of methods capable of capturing the complexities of the rural–urban continuum. Indeed, issues of data scarcity and sparsity in rural areas are a limiting factor for many of the standard methods used in criminology, such as tools to detect spatial concentration, measures of risk and modelling. We also argue that the study of crime and crime prevention in rural contexts demands an integrated and interdisciplinary set of theories and methods that can provide guidance to deal with an ever-increasing amount of data from relatively new sources such as crowdsourcing, social media, and remote sensing including drones. The aim of this special issue is to advance the scholarship on conducting criminological research in rural contexts, from remote areas to the urban fringe. This collection of original research is devoted to the processes of preparation of data, execution of research and analysis of crime and safety. The included studies explore both traditional and new forms of data and/or methods, ranging from primary sources (e.g., interviews, online surveys) and secondary official statistical data (e.g., crime records) to media coverage (e.g., articles in newspapers), crowdsourced data, social media posts, and the like. Methods vary from qualitative (e.g., focus groups, observations) to quantitative (e.g., regression models), including statistical measures and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). In particular, we have observed that although the role of place has become increasingly important in criminology (Eck & Weisburd, 1995), much of the traditional rural criminology literature has paid little attention to the geographical features of crime even when data were available. Recent interdisciplinary perspectives from geography and other related fields are showing the advantages of embracing a spatial approach to rural and environmental crime (Ceccato, in press). We hold that knowing where crime occurs and how it is distributed is important for understanding its nature and prevention. Therefore, in this special issue we offer examples of studies that critically discuss different (spatial) approaches to capturing crime dynamics as well as the best ways of preventing it along the rural– urban continuum. The concept of the rural–urban continuum is used here to stress the notion that ‘there are no sharp breaking points to be found in the degree or quantity of rural/urban differences’ (Planning Tank, 2017), rather a flow of people and goods in space where crime takes place. The contents of this special issue illustrate a wide range of crimes as well as issues of perceived safety, adopting international, intersectional, and/or gender-informed perspectives. Contributions have included the analysis of crime along the rural–urban continuum, victimization, determinants of crime and fear in rural contexts, spatio-temporal patterns of crime and safety perceptions among residents and visitors. Another feature of this special issue is that it includes multidisciplinary contributions beyond the fields of sociology and criminology, by academics and practitioners, from India, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Commentary