Keywords

This chapter reports on the growing body of literature on crime and safety in rural areas. The international literature is quite definitive about the complexity of rural areas and how their nature affects crime, safety perceptions, policing, and practices of crime prevention. In order to show evidence of this rich and vast body of research, we have executed a systematic review of four decades of English-language publications (in Scopus, JSTOR, and ScienceDirect) from 1980 to 2020 (Moher et al. 2009),Footnote 1 including articles, books, and book chapters, and excluding so-called gray literature as much as possible. We characterize the research on crime and safety in rural areas; highlight some of the most important themes, such as policing and crime prevention; and emphasize the importance of the interdisciplinary nature of the field.

Out of the 840 initially identified publications in total, 410 were found to be eligible publications, of which 78% were journal articles and the remainder were books and book chapters. By assigning themes to each publication, we were able to categorize the research into 12 themes (Fig. 3.1). This review in general, and the identified themes in particular, illustrate that rural criminology is a rich field of research that contributes to both criminology and numerous other related disciplines, such as rural studies and policing. In this chapter, we summarize some of the main findings, while in Chap. 4, we discuss the research in more detail, including examples.

Fig. 3.1
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Research on rural crime and safety 1980–2020 collected in Scopus, JSTOR, and ScienceDirect (N = 410), where each publication was assigned a maximum of two themes. Source: Based on Abraham and Ceccato (forthcoming)

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Most reviewed publications dealt with trends and patterns of crime, at different degrees, in one or more rural areas (21%), followed by studies on rural police, policing, and the rest of the criminal justice system, including the court system and prison industry (21%) (Fig. 3.1).

This theme on crime trends in rural areas covered over a fifth (21%, n = 85) of the publications reviewed for this book, mainly from North America, followed by British and Australian cases. Most of these studies utilized secondary data and official records (56%), and/or performed statistical analyses (35%). Studies of crime trends in the Global South were often published more recently, for example, China (Cheong and Wu 2015), Brazil (Scorzafave et al. 2015), Haiti (Brewis et al. 2020), Zimbabwe (Mafumbabete et al. 2019), and Nigeria (Osakwe and Osakwe 2015).

Regarding the theme on policing and the criminal justice system, despite it being one of the earliest and most covered topics of research, systematic studies of rural policing were rare before the 1970s (Payne et al. 2005). Some of the more comprehensive studies were published in the late twentieth century, such as the studies by Weisheit et al. (1995) and Sims (1988). The methods used in these studies were mainly secondary data (34%), interviews (24%), surveys (17%), and statistical analyses (15%). These studies were affiliated with universities in the United States followed by the United Kingdom, but also a number of other countries, such as Canada, Sweden, Australia, and Tanzania.

Violence is the theme of 15% of the reviewed publications, often focusing on domestic violence and violence against women but some focusing on general “street violence” and other types of assaults in public places. Fear of crime was also a major theme with 57 publications, of which 78% were related to fear of crime in rural contexts, 10% to fear of “others,” and 12% to both or other related anxieties. Rural crime prevention also appeared in a notable number of the studies (10%), of which 46% covered police-based prevention and community efforts, 22% focused on the use of different types of technologies in situational crime prevention, such security alarms and CCTVs, and the rest covered both types. Within our time frame, the earliest study in this theme of crime prevention appeared in 1986 (Shernock 1986), while 41% of this research were published after 2015. The most used methods were surveys (37%), followed by secondary data (34%), and interviews and statistical analyses (22%). Crime prevention in the United States was studied the most, followed by Australia, Sweden, and Tanzania.

Another common subject was perceptions of safety and fear of crime in rural contexts, accounting for 14% (n = 59) of our reviewed publications. Fear in rural areas has been written about comparably longer than other themes, as more publications were published before 2010 than after. Surveys (53%) followed by interviews (22%) were the most used methods. Although the sample was dominated by the northern hemisphere, studies of safety in rural contexts are also found in Australia and New Zealand, as well as countries of the Global South including India, Mexico and Central America, Pakistan, and Turkey.

Rural crime prevention and interventions for improving safety was identified as a theme in 10% of the publications. The earliest study within our time frame appeared in 1986 (Shernock 1986), while 41% of the studies were published after 2015. The most frequently used methods were surveys (37%), followed by secondary data (34%), and interviews and statistical analyses (22%). Most publications focused on preventing crime in rural America, while Australia, Sweden, and Tanzania were present in more studies than the United Kingdom.

The international literature from 1980 to 2020 shows that the theme Environmental and Wildlife Crime (EWC) covered 7% of all the reviewed publications (n = 30). Research on environmental crime has mainly been conducted in the past decade, with 94% having been published in 2011–2020. Among the methods identified (n = 45), most publications utilized secondary data in their analysis (27%), followed by interviews (19%) as well as reviews of other research and other theoretical pieces (14%). In this theme, the United States is the most studied area (22%), followed by the United Kingdom and Sweden (19% each). Studies on the Global South include examples from Brazil, Indonesia, and Ghana.

Drugs in rural areas were part of 7% of the publications in the literature review. While there have been several comprehensive studies on drugs within rural criminology, findings have to some extent been limited to the context of the United States, providing little perspective on drug behavior, production or markets in rural areas in, for example, Europe or the Global South. Exceptions to this were a handful of studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Thailand. Many of the studies used interviews as their main method (37%), followed by secondary data analysis (33%), and use of statistical analyses such as regression models (26%). The most common topic was substance abuse, especially related to the rural youth, although in studies in the Global South it is more common to examine rural drug production.

Several studies on crime trends may have included data on property crime, but only 5% (n = 22) of the reviewed publications covered rural property crime as a distinct theme. Of these, close to 60% were published in the span of 2010-2020. Surveys were the most common method, used in 32% of the studies, while statistical analyses such as regression models were applied in 26% of the articles. The most common study areas were the United States and the United Kingdom, followed by Sweden, Australia, and Malaysia. Studies would often investigate rural rates of property crime overall, but specific types such as burglaries and farm-related thefts were also common.

Among the minor topics, we find hate crime, organized crime, as well as other more emergent topics within rural criminology. Hate crime has been a largely unstudied area in rural criminology with only 18 identified publications (4%) in our selected time period. Secondary data (19%) and interviews (15%) were the most frequent methods among the studies, followed by surveys and literature reviews (11% each). Notably, India and the United Kingdom were the two most studied areas, followed by Brazil and the United States.

Organized crime constituted a similar size as hate crime, with total of 4% (n = 17) of the reviewed publications. Roughly two-fifths (41.7%) of the publications used interviews as a method for data collection, while nearly one-fifth (19%) employed field work. The United States was the most frequent studied area, followed by British examples. Other studies were mainly situated in Latin America, including Peru, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba.

Other topics that could not be classified into the other themes and those considered more emergent comprised 2% of the reviewed publications (n = 8). All of these were published in 2011–2020. This research was dominated by examples from the Global South, including India, Bangladesh, Ghana, and China. Here secondary data were utilized in 38% of the publications, with interviews and literature reviews in a quarter each. This theme included rare topics such as rural corruption (Banerjee et al. 2014; Cheng and Urpelainen 2019) and rural prostitution, as in Scott (2016).

In most of these studies, there is a recognition that criminology has for decades relied on urban understandings of rural crime and rural offenders. Some recently published studies have expanded the urban-centric framework, calling for theoretical and empirical models that can better explain the mechanisms behind crime in areas on the rural-urban continuum. This research has also focused on understandings of the intersections of demographic, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors; cultural contexts; and situational conditions that are typical to rural areas.

Research findings from multiple studies indicate that, over the years, crime has decreased overall in many parts of the world, but there are major variations between indicators and crime types. Historically, rural areas in most countries exhibited lower crime rates than urban areas (with a few exceptions), but lately rural areas are showing higher increases than (some) urban areas for certain types of crime. During the past decades, there have been signs that rural and urban crime rates are converging (urban decreasing and rural increasing), but crime underreporting and definitional, theoretical, and methodological difficulties in comparing crime rates across geographies still limit the analyses of crime trends (e.g. Ceccato, 2016). In quantitative studies, the implementation of “rural” as an analytical category can vary significantly, not only between countries but also between studies in a single country; see examples in the United States, Sweden, and Brazil in the next chapter.

In addition, the reviewed publications show how crime prevention programs have been urban-centric as well, meaning they are often imported from urban areas and directly applied in a way that ignores the uniqueness of rural contexts. Therefore, studies indicate that there is need for comparative analyses based on more than just rural-urban dichotomies, in particular in relation to crime prevention and police practices. A future approach that recognizes rural-urban interlinkages would further cement the complexities of rural areas without the need for comparisons with the urban norm, which may not be an appropriate reference in the first place.

A small set of the reviewed studies examine the spatial and temporal characteristics of rural crime. The literature has also identified some of the typical offenders in rural areas, as well as how deviant behavior may be normalized among the local population. There have been studies on how globalization, organized crime, new ideological trends, and ICT have influenced criminogenic conditions in the countryside (e.g., computer-based fraud, illegal animal rights activism, animal abuse, drugs, wage theft, slavery, racism).

Authors were most frequently affiliated with universities and colleges in the United States (41%), while British institutions came second, followed by Australian, Swedish, and Canadian universities. More recently, book chapters and articles have also been published by authors in and about the Global South, namely, India, Malaysia, Brazil, China, and a few African countries. Publications by female lead authors (nfemale = 143) were most common in the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Of the female lead authors not at universities and colleges in these five countries, most were in the Global South (nfemale = 26) rather than other countries in the Global North (nfemale = 7). Figure 3.2 shows the reviewed publications by (a) university affiliation (when the affiliation of the first author(s) could be identified) and by (b) study area.

Fig. 3.2
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(a) Reviewed publications on rural crime and safety 1980-2020 by university affiliation (first author)Fig. 3.2 (b) Reviewed publications on rural crime and safety 1980-2020 by study area. Source: Based on Abraham and Ceccato (forthcoming)

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In terms of methods, approximately half the reviewed publications utilized qualitative methods, a third quantitative methods, and the rest a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods (Fig. 3.3). Yet, studies showed major variations in methodology.

Fig. 3.3
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Methods utilized in the reviewed publications on rural crime and safety 1980–2020 (N = 410). Studies were assigned one or more methods. Source: Based on Abraham and Ceccato (forthcoming)

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From 1980 to 2000, the number of publications grew slowly, but a major increase occurred after 2011. This review follows and complements the existent compilations of literature by Hubbard et al. (1980), by Marshall and Johnson (2005), and on rural policing by Tucker (2015), as these reviews were neither systematic (Higgins and Green 2011) nor comprehensive (see also Weisheit (2016)). Interestingly, one of the earliest publications in our time frame was a compilation of North American literature on rural crime prevention and criminal justice (Hubbard et al. 1980) that reviewed also studies dating back to the early nineteenth century on rural-urban differences in crime and victimization. Also of note is an early article written by Laub (1981) which assessed the variation in crime reporting to the police among victims in urban, suburban, and rural areas. And one of the most recent articles from 2020 by Arisukwu et al. (2020) reported examples of informal crime prevention practices in rural Nigeria, which showed (via surveys) that poor safety perceptions are linked to crime victimization and poor police presence.

Different theoretical traditions characterize the studies over these four decades. The theme encompassing theory in rural criminology covers 7% of the reviewed publications (Fig. 3.1). These studies have expanded on definitions, concepts, and theoretical models. Half of the studies were published between 2015 and 2020, and were often written by authors in the United States and the United Kingdom but also in France, Slovenia, and Australia (Barclay 2017; Harris and Harkness 2016; Hodgkinson and Harkness 2020; Meško 2020; Mouhanna 2016).

Social disorganization theory is among the most common criminological approaches to explain rural crime. Although contemporary criminology associates social disorganization with urban areas and the Chicago School, the concept actually emerged from studies of rural Europe (for an in-depth discussion, see Rogers and Pridemore (2016)). In its North American version, social disorganization theory suggests that structural disadvantage breeds crime and that offending occurs when impaired social bonds are insufficient to enforce legitimate behavior and discourage offending. The legacy of social disorganization (Bursik 1999; Kornhauser 1978; Sampson 1986; Shaw and McKay 1942) has been observed in many contexts. Population size, mobility and instability, income, unemployment, and degree of urbanization are conditions that have consistently been found to relate to crime (Allen and Cancino 2012; Barnett and Mencken 2002; Fafchamps and Minten 2006; Jobes 1999; Ukert et al. 2018). Although Jobes et al. (2004) found support for the theory in rural areas, economic factors showed weaker relationships with crime than social factors such as population diversity and family stability.

Other theories in environmental criminology also comprises an integral part of the reviewed rural crime literature, including applications of routine activity theory and situational crime prevention to rural areas in different countries (e.g., Aransiola and Ceccato 2020; Ceccato 2015; Harkness 2020; Harris and Harkness 2016). One example includes the analysis of environmental crime. While the first studies in this area were concerned with crime geography and prevention (e.g., Ceccato and Uittenbogaard 2013; Cowan et al. 2020; Maingi et al. 2012; Stassen and Ceccato 2020), new research of a more “tactical” nature is emerging, for example, detecting a place’s equivalent to a “fingerprint,” which is important information for crime investigation and prevention (Lega et al. 2014).

Finally, critical perspectives on rural criminology and the intersectionality of safety heavily dominated the past two decades of reviewed studies, with numerous contributions from North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Carrington et al. 2014; DeKeseredy et al. 2007; Donnermeyer 2007, 2012, 2017, 2018; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2013; Donnermeyer et al. 2013; Garland and Chakraborti 2006; Robinson and Gardner 2012; Rogers and Pridemore 2016; Smith and McElwee 2013; Somerville et al. 2015; Yarwood 2010; Yarwood and Edwards 1995) and also from Green Criminology (White 2013; Nurse and Whyatt 2020).

In summary, although studies in rural criminology have been testing a diverse set of theoretical traditions, in the next chapter we show examples of how the discipline is slowly expanding to theoretical perspectives beyond the boundaries of criminology. Examples include, for instance, studies involving engineering, computer science but also psychology, architecture, and geography. An example of this trend is analyzing how police and voluntary organizations use social media to engage communities in sparsely populated areas. In Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7, we draw attention to a selection of research fields on crime and safety in areas on the rural-urban continuum.