Keywords

Underlying many efforts to understand crime commission is attempting to find ways to prevent it. Crime prevention can be defined as “an activity, by an individual or a group, public or private, that precludes the incidence of one or more criminal acts” (Brantingham and Faust 1976, p. 284). Prevention may also include measures to improve the safety perceptions of those who may feel unsafe due to particular situational conditions in both rural and urban areas.

Rural and urban experiences of crime prevention policy implementation can be contrasting. In the late 1990s in countries like the United Kingdom and Sweden, crime legislation and national policy programs came into force that moved the responsibility for policing and crime prevention from national to local authorities (Justitiedepartementet 1996; Pierpoint et al. 1998). This trend has also been observed in Australia with policies that emphasize residents’ personal responsibility regarding crime control (Lupton 1999). Pierpoint et al. (1998) argues that these types of policy shifts may have complex implications for crime prevention in rural communities. This is because rural areas may have a greater need for authorities with different political agendas to cooperate, impeding the formation of local crime prevention initiatives. Moreover, the economic strain caused by the needed implementations is likely to be felt in particular by rural authorities, whose resources often already are spread quite thin. 

In general, crime prevention initiatives and safety intervention models have long been urban-centric, ignoring unique rural problems and challenges, patterns of crime, as well as the heterogeneity of different rural areas (Ceccato and Dolmen 2013; Smith and Huff 1982). The rural-urban interlinkages are continuously transforming the situational conditions in which crime occurs, but such dynamic conditions are rarely reflected in the way crime prevention is put into practice in rural areas. With globalization and following the, for example, expansion of ICT-networks (Ceccato and Dolmen 2013), crime opportunities are becoming less dependent on physical space, which demands a diverse understanding of rural areas to tackle rural crime (Bell and Hall 2007) and people’s safety perceptions. We now present examples of knowledge about crime prevention and interventions that aim at improving safety perceptions in rural areas.

Community Policing in Action

Crime prevention in rural areas is largely characterized by forms of community policing and local partnerships, for example, neighborhood watch schemes and farm watch and patrols (Ceccato and Dolmen 2013). Such activity types have often been first utilized in and later imported from urban areas to rural areas despite the fact that formal policing has often been more prioritized and better funded in urban than in rural areas (Buck et al. 1983).

There exists a body of research on the role of community participation in crime prevention in rural areas. In the United Kingdom, for instance, interventions such as neighborhood watch schemes have been shown to contribute to improving safety perceptions and improving relationships with the police (Yarwood and Edwards 1995). In rural Sweden, there exist broader crime prevention initiatives focused on creating local partnerships, although participants often have an institutionalized role in these local partnerships as their participation is linked to their regular jobs within police organizations, social services or other, related organizations (Ceccato 2015d). Other international cases reported in the criminological literature indicate that these participatory schemes are not problem free, as they may suffer from considerable social bias (Lab and Stanich 1994; Shernock 1986; Smith and Lab 1991; Yarwood and Edwards 1995), and as they are said to be controlled by the local, rural elite that focuses more on the exclusion of marginalized groups than on preventing crime (Mawby and Yarwood 2011; Yarwood 2015).

Evidence from the Global South shows that community participation plays a central role in crime prevention, such as in Nigeria (Arisukwu et al. 2020), or efforts of ethnic vigilante groups like the Sungsungu people in Tanzania (Bukurura 1995; Jakobsen 2016; Kudo 2020; Mkutu 2010).

Technological Crime Prevention Measures

The application of technology to prevent crime in rural areas has been largely under-researched. Studies that exist have examined, for example, technological approaches to prevent farm theft (Harkness and Larkins 2020); housing design to prevent residential burglaries (Hamid and Yusof 2013); and effects of lighting on reducing violent crime (Arvate et al. 2018). Aransiola and Ceccato (2020) reviewed applications of modern technologies in situational crime prevention and found that traditional measures (locking doors, guard dogs, raising fences, etc.) were still the most common in rural areas, while modern measures (CCTV, security lights, alarms, drones, etc.) were generally more supplemental. CCTV and alarms have been shown to have little to no effect on preventing crime, especially on farms, but they have proven better at detecting and monitoring wildlife crime (Aransiola and Ceccato 2020; Liedka et al. 2019). There is evidence that lighting plays a positive role in deterring crime, such as security lights for farm crime (Aransiola and Ceccato 2020) and regular street lights for violent crime (Arvate et al. 2018).

Prevention of Some Typical Rural Issues

Issues of youth crime and delinquency are of central importance to crime prevention initiatives in rural areas due to the common perception of young people being disorderly, the association with drug and alcohol addiction, and the risk of the development of early career criminals (Ceccato 2015b). The international literature make reference to efforts to combat substance abuse among youths in Slovenia and have included stricter regulations on the sale of alcohol and presenting anti-drug propaganda in schools (Petrovskiy 2020). Crime prevention groups in, for example, Sweden have usually taken two approaches to youth problems in rural areas: the first targeting individuals already causing concern, and utilizing interventions involving the school, family, police, and social services; the second focusing on all young people with initiatives aiming to keep young people “busy” (Ceccato and Dolmen 2013).

The policing and prevention of drug crime in rural areas can be a controversial issue. The so-called war on drugs in the United States has been criticized for unfairly targeting the poor and people of certain ethnicities, which holds true for rural areas as well (see, e.g., Abadie et al. 2018; Shukla et al. 2019; Zaller et al. 2016). Police in Scotland have noted the difficulty in disrupting drug markets in certain rural areas as drug organizations from elsewhere can maintain “markets by proxy” in these areas (Clark et al. 2020). A number of strategies have been reported to reduce substance abuse among rural youth, including warding off the “boredom of the countryside” (Ceccato 2015b). In general, measures that include interactive elements and community-based efforts have had shown better outcomes (Milano et al. 2017; Stallwitz 2016).

As for farm crime, opportunity models have been found to be effective for prevention. Barclay and Donnermeyer (2011) applied routine activity theory, situational crime prevention, and crime pattern theory to study farm security in Australia. Results showed that, for example, better visibility of farm sheds and other buildings from the residence was linked to lower crime (of most types), while being located closer to highways increased the risk of being victimized by malicious damage, illegal hunting, and trespassing. Similarly, accessible rural areas in Sweden experienced the highest rates of theft of tractors, diesel and other fuels, and drug production, compared to remote rural and urban areas (Ceccato 2015c). Applications of CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) have also proven to be useful for farm crime prevention, such as when analyzing the relation between housing architectural design and farm burglaries (Molaei and Hashempour 2020)

Further challenges can be identified regarding the prevention of farm crime. The difficulty of policing and preventing farm crime has been emphasized repeatedly in the research, and it is partly due to the lack of available and detailed data from official sources which fail to distinguish between farm crime and other types of crime (Ceccato and Dolmen 2013; Mears et al. 2007a). This is further perpetuated by the poor crime reporting practices of farmers to the police (Barclay et al. 2004; Ceccato 2015e; Mears et al. 2007b), which may be due to low levels of trust in the police and/or public authorities (considering reporting as a “waste of time”); fear of being excluded by the community; but also traditionally having a higher tolerance for, or even expectation of certain crimes, such as crop theft for subsistence (Bunei et al. 2016; Ceccato 2015e; Donnermeyer 2017). Farmers also tend to be lax with farm security, perhaps due to perceptions of low crime risk (Barclay and Donnermeyer 2002; Smith 2019).

Domestic violence is a central topic when discussing rural crime and crime prevention. Similar to farm crime, violence against women is highly underreported (although this is more likely due to societal norms and shame), and accessibility to services such as women’s shelters are very limited in rural areas (Ceccato 2015a). DeKeseredy (2020) described points that can help prevent rural violence against women, including education and creating awareness of the problem as important initial steps (although an overly critical tone may backfire). Placemaking has been considered as a way to create trust and shared history in the community through festivals, music, and art, which can be used to confront expressions of rural patriarchy (see also DeKeseredy et al. (2009) for a similar application of second-generation CPTED principles to prevent violence against women). Men’s mindsets and understanding of violence against women must be changed to rework detrimental, trained behaviors. This issue has been attempted to be solved through, for example, men’s forums and providing places for men to talk, including those with a background of domestic abuse (Ceccato 2015a).

As for preventing EWC, deterrence and opportunity-reducing measures are some common approaches, but due to the complex and ambiguous nature of these crimes, they may be hard to police. Fines are among the most common punishments for EWC, but as previously noted, larger corporations may simply incorporate these as ‘the price of doing business’. The difficulty in ascertaining if a crime has occurred, coupled with low detection rates, makes it harder to enforce any measures. Also, relying too heavily on deterrence measures may disregard the various motivations for EWC, for example, non-compliance in the case of illegal hunting (von Essen et al. 2016). Reward and opportunity-reducing measures must be implemented together with efforts to increase awareness of and engagement in the problem in order to combat EWC (Ceccato 2015e). Furthermore, technology can be utilized to increase detection rates, thus improving the potential of preventative work. For example, CCTV can be used to monitor wildlife and offenders where guardianship is low. Gargiulo et al. (2016) found that remote sensing is a very reliable method to detect pollution from cattle farms, with a detection capability of 90%.

Crime prevention is a well-researched area within criminology in general, but, thus far, not enough emphasis has been given to rural problems and rural contexts, although research in this topic is steadly increasing in the last decades. International evidence shows that rural crime prevention relies highly on the community themselves to deter crime and tackle problems of poor perceived safety. Unfortunately, the perception of the “rural idyll” may have both diminished the perceived need for specific care for rural crime prevention and even made residents complacent about their personal security. Geographical obstacles, trust in police, unequal access to services, and rural norms and notions of who belongs to the community are just a few aspects that must be considered before developing and implementing crime prevention initiatives intended for areas on the rural-urban continuum.