Citation

Ceccato V. Int. Crim. Justice Rev. 2021; 31(4): 365-368.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Georgia State University, College of Health and Human Sciences, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/10575677211041941

PMID

unavailable

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...

Language: en