New South Wales Farm Crime Survey 2020

/in , /by
Are you a farmer in New South Wales, Australia? Have your say to help fight rural crime!

Crimes that impact on pastoral, agricultural and aquacultural operations cost Australia millions of dollars each year and can have devastating financial, mental and physical impacts on our rural landowners and communities.

Farm crime offences most commonly reported include the theft of livestock, produce, tools, machinery and equipment, vehicles, fuel and other farm inputs, and incidences of vandalism, arson, trespassing, illegal hunting, and sabotage.

However, we still need more evidence and research to better understand the extent of the problem of rural crime, its impacts on landowners and primary producers, and the most effective and achievable solutions.

To help fill this information gap, The UNE Centre for Rural Criminology is conducting the NSW Farm Crime Survey 2020.

If you are involved in farming in New South Wales, your insights will help us better understand the scope of the problem and plan effective measures that can be taken by the government, law enforcement agencies and farmers to reduce the incidence of farm crime across NSW.

The survey can be taken anonymously and will ask for your experiences and perceptions of farm crime, your attitudes towards the policing of and criminal justice responses to farm crime, and your awareness and implementation of crime prevention measures.

Click here to complete the NSW Farm Crime Survey 2020.

If you have any questions about the survey, please contact Dr Kyle Mulrooney, Co-Director of the UNE Centre for Rural Criminology by email or call (02) 6773 1940.

New rural crime book series!

/in , , /by

‘RESEARCH IN RURAL CRIME’ BOOK SERIES

 

Myths about peaceful, crime-free areas beyond the cityscape persist, but in fact rural crime is multi-faceted, raising new policy predicaments about policing and security governance. With approximately 46 percent of the global population living in rural areas, a focus on rural crime in these diverse communities is critical.

Filling a gap in the discipline, the ‘Research in Rural Crime’ series – published by Bristol University Press – provides an outlet for original, cutting-edge research in this emergent criminological subfield. Truly international in nature, it leads the way for new research and writing on a wide range of rural crime topics, rural transgressions, security and justice.

The series editors would welcome monograph-length titles that are jurisdictional specific or related to themes that transcend political and juridical boundaries, presenting outlooks on contemporary and pressing public policy issues. Contributors to this series present pioneering interdisciplinary and comparative rural criminological perspectives. Titles will be theoretically and conceptually driven, empirical or adopting mixed-methods approaches, and topics will focus on regional, rural and remote parts of the globe that are often overlooked in criminological works. Books in this series can be sole or joint authored, or edited collections, and will be between 60,000 and 80,000 words in length.

If you would like to submit a proposal or discuss ideas, then please contact the Series Editors:

Alistair Harkness alistair.harkness@federation.edu.au
Matt Bowden matt.bowden@TUDublin.ie

Further information can be accessed at https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/research-in-rural-crime

New book – “Rural Crime Prevention”

/in , , , /by

A new book entitled Rural Crime Prevention: Theory, Tactics and Techniques, edited by our Secretary Alistair Harkness, will be published in April 2020 by Routledge. The book brings toghether 20 academic chapters and 12 practitioner perspectives, and critically analyses, challenges, considers and assesses a suite of crime prevention initiatives across an array of international contexts.

This book recognises the diversity and distinct features of rural places and the ways that these elements impact on rates, experiences and responses. Crucially, Rural Crime Prevention also incorporates non-academic voices which are embedded throughout the book, linking theory and scholarship with practice.

Proactive responses to rural offending based on sound evidence can serve to facilitate feelings of safety and security throughout communities, enhance individual wellbeing and alleviate pressure on the overburdened and typically under-resourced formal elements of the criminal justice system. This book provides an opportunity to focus on the prevention of crime in regional, rural and remote parts of the globe.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, policing, sociology and practitioners interested in learning about the best-practice international approaches to rural crime prevention in the twenty-first century.

Pre-orders are availble via the Routledge website, and a 20 percent discount is offered if using the code in this flier: authorflyerbeforepub

 

Latest issue of the International Journal of Rural Criminology out now

/in , /by

(Post by Joe Donnermeyer)

Volume 5, Issue 1 of IJRC is now available through the OSU Knowledge Bank or through the following links:

https://doi.org/10.18061/1811/88724 or https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/88724

 

This issue is a special issue, edited by Alistair Harkness, based on a rural-focused workshop attended by about two dozen scholars held in February, 2019 at the Gippsland campus of Federation University in Victoria, Australia. This workshop was funded by The Academy of the Social Science in Australia, with participants coming from many different universities and an equal diversity of disciplines. To quote Alistair Harkness from the editor’s introduction:

“This Workshop, I believe, serves as an exemplar of the unity of purpose of cross-disciplinary, cross-jurisdictional colleagues with an interest in improving circumstances and outcomes for rural communities, and perhaps might be a model that could be replicated in various other jurisdictions.”

I hope you enjoy reading all of the contributions over the holidays.

Member in the Spotlight (June 2019): Bridget Harris

/in , , , /by

ISSRC founding member and Society Treasurer, Dr Bridget Harris, is this month’s member in the spotlight. You can follow her on Twitter.

Based in the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre, School of Justice, Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology, Bridget works in the areas of domestic and family violence; technology-facilitated violence, advocacy and justice administration; spatiality; access to justice; and legal advocacy.

Bridget actively combines her scholarship with practical outcomes – and has been invited to advise police and legal bodies in her research fields, and her research has informed policy and practice nationally and internationally (including in the Royal Commission into Family Violence and Law Council of Australia’s report, The Justice Project, focused on the state of access to justice in the nation).

Bridget has a long-running interest in rural criminology. In 2014, along with Amanda George, she prepared the ground-breaking Landscapes of Violence report which assessed the multitude of issues facing victims and survivors of family violence in rural and regional Victoria, Australia.

She edited (with Alistair Harkness and David Baker Locating Crime in Context and Place: Perspectives on Regional, Rural and Remote Australia (Federation Press, 2016). She is lead editor, with Delanie Woodlock, of the forthcoming Domestic Violence and Technology: Experiences, Perpetration and Responses (Routledge, 2021).

Bridget has not one but two articles in the May 2019 issue of The British Journal of Criminology (Vol 59 Issue 3) – the first with Delanie Woodlock on digital coercive control and domestic violence and violence against women; and the second with Heather Douglas and Molly Dragiewicz on technology facilitated violence.

11 fresh rural crime research articles

/in , , , /by

Volume 31, Edition 4 of Acta Criminologica, the Southern African Journal of Criminology, contains a wealth of new research on rural crime.

This special edition, edited by ISSRC executive member Willie Clack, contains 11 articles which will be of much interest and usefulness to scholars and others interested in rural crime. This collection of research contributes greatly to arresting the “trend of neglect” in criminological research which Willie Clack argues focuses on urban crime with rural crimes too often not recognised as a distinct phenomenon “despite equal importance”.

Articles in the special edition

Rural crimes: non-reporting of livestock theft by farmers

The impact of crime on farms: an international synthesis

The context of farm crime in Australia

Stocktheft in Kenya: patterns, drivers and challenges

Grazing with bullets in Africa: Fulani herdsmen-community killings and state response in Nigeria

A criminological assessment of ritualistic mutilation as a component of predatory theft of livestock in rural South Africa

Making rural areas safer: potential benefits of the rural safety plan

An examination of co-operative strategies towards policing stocktheft in the Kwazulu-Natal province

The integration of conventional and technological methods in combating stock theft by selected stakeholders in the Kwazulu-Natal province

The impact of conservation crime on the South African rural economy: a case study of rhino poaching

A discussion of rhino horn domestic trade legalisation in South Africa

“Horizon Scanning Rural Crime in England”

/in /by

Dr Kreseda Smith and Dr Richard Byrne are members of the Rural Security Research Group at Harper Adams University – Kreseda is also a member of the Executive of ISSRC.

Their latest research paper, “Horizon Scanning Rural Crime in England”, has been published in the Crime Prevention and Community Safety journal. The full-text view-only version of the paper is provided online by Springer as part of their commitment to content sharing.

In the article, Kreseda and Richard observe that rural crime scholarship emanating for the United Kingdom is scant, particularly when compared with the volume of research being produced in United States and Australian contexts.

The paper considers emerging rural crime threats in England and ‘horizon scanning’ as a methodology to aid practitioners both in the United Kingdom and internationally.

The emerging crimes considered in the article are:

  • Poaching and hare coursing
  • Agrochemical theft and counterfeiting
  • Theft of commercial solar panels
  • Heritage crime and illegal off‑roading
  • Cybercrime and drones
  • Modern slavery