Farm Crime in England and Wales: A Preliminary Scoping Study Examining Farmer Attitudes

Abstract

Farms stand apart from other rural businesses in the levels of crimes they experience, and the impact of farm crime reverberates far beyond the immediate rural community. However, there continues to be a lack of interest in farm crime as a research topic in both England and Wales. This study explores attitudes of farmers towards farm crime, crime prevention, the police, and potential predictors of farm victimisation 2 . An online survey was completed by 71 farmers; a further 55 farmers partially completed the survey providing important additional data. An analysis of the survey results shows low levels of confidence in and reporting to the police, low levels of crime prevention usage, and varying potential predictors of victimisation.. This survey extends existing international farm crime research to the UK, and aims to establish an understanding of farmers' attitudes towards crime prevention and the police; and how these attitudes and farm characteristics relate to victimisation levels. This lays the foundations for further research and the introduction of behavioural science into the farm crime prevention arena.

The victimisation of farms in Ireland: fear of crime, social isolation and crime prevention

“…Previous farm crime surveys, across a number of different countries, have found relatively high rates of past-year victimisation. These have ranged from: 30% in a Swedish study (Ceccato 2016 ); 50 and 62% in an American study (Mears et al 2007 ); 50 (Morris et al 2020 ), 62 (Smith and Byrne 2017 ) and 82.5% (Sugden 1999 ) in three British studies; and 87% in an Australian study (Barclay and Donnermeyer 2002 ). Another American study found that 33.4% of farms had been the victim of theft (McIntyre et al 2017 ).…”

Conducting Online Crime and Safety Surveys with British Farmers

“…This was the approach adopted by Smith (2017) where data from farmers who had been a victim of farm crime was obtained, as well as responses from those farmers who had not victims.…”

“…Despite this, it is only in recent times that online surveys have been used to explore issues around rural crime. In the United Kingdom currently, there have been very few examples of academic research employing this methodology and only, seemingly, within the last 5 years (Morris & Norris, 2020; Morris et al, 2017; Smith, 2017, 2020). Rural stakeholders continue to dominate the use of online surveys to explore rural crime (Farmers Weekly, 2019; National Rural Crime Network, 2018; NFU Cymru, 2021; NFU Mutual, 2020).…”

“…This will then allow you to obtain a wider field of participants than just those British farmers who have been a victim of hare coursing. This was the approach adopted by Smith (2017) where data from farmers who had been a victim of farm crime was obtained, as well as responses from those farmers who had not victims.…”

“…There are few examples of the use of rural online surveys in academic research with British farmers. Some of these are crime-related (Smith, 2017(Smith, , 2020, while most are not (Easton et al, 2018;May et al 2019). Many of the online surveys conducted with British farmers tend to be carried out by key stakeholders and representative organisations: Future Farmers Survey (NFU, 2020), Big Farmland Bird Count (GWCT, 2021), June Survey of Agriculture and Horticulture (Defra, 2020a).…”