Introduction: Locating Regional, Rural, and Remote Crime in Theoretical and Contemporary Context

Abstract

The urban focus of crime- and street-based crime in particular- has for eons attracted the attention of criminologists. A geographic bias did not exist in all scholarly fields: anthropologists and geographers, for instance, gave greater consideration to issues and differences across locations (Donnermeyer 2014). Yet internationally, until the end of the 20th century, rural criminology "received little attention in the research literature beyond occasional descriptive glances" (Weisheit & Wells 1996, p 379; see also Barclay et al 2007; Coventry & Palmer 2008; Jobes et al 2000; Donnermeyer, Jobes & Barclay 2006). "One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological cannon", as Carrington, Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy (2014, p 464) identify, "has been its urban-centric bias': Internationally, Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy (2014, p 2) assert that "rural crime has ranked among the least studied social problems in criminology': Criminological literature has typically focused explicitly on the urban context or, at the very least, overlooked or downplayed contextual variances in geographic settings.