Crime in developing countries: the contribution of crime science

© 2016 Natarajan. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. It could be argued that many of the most serious crime problems are now to be found in developing countries. Yet these problems have received only scant attention from criminologists and crime scientists, most of whom work in developed/Westernized nations. Crime scientists have a special role to play in studying these crimes because their work is oriented to solutions and it is this kind of practical help that the developing world most needs. Using crime opportunity theory, the articles included in this issue examines a selection of these crimes, many of which are relatively uncommon in the west: maritime piracy, illegal fishing, poaching of endangered animals, gang warfare and homicide and ransom kidnappings. They illustrate how crime science methodologies and techniques can be harnessed in seeking to understand and prevent crimes in the developing world. Whether judged by official statistics or victim surveys, crime rates in most developed countries have been falling for many years (Farrell et al. 2011; Elonheimo 2014), but there is scant evidence that developing countries have enjoyed these same benefits. In fact, routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson 1979) tells us that with increasing affluence these countries might be experiencing the increases in crime that occurred 50 or 60 years ago in developed countries. A case in point: Nick Ross (2013) describes the rise in burglary he encountered on a visit to rural China at the start of the surge in economic growth in the 1980s. The local mayor admitted televisions were being stolen from people’s homes, a form of crime that had been unheard of in the past. When Ross asked him what had changed he seemed surprised to be asked. “We didn’t have televisions before,” he answered. Many developing countries are plagued not just by ordinary volume crimes, but also by culturally-sanctioned violence against women and gays and serious forms of transnational crime such as sex trafficking, drug trafficking, murderous incursions by militias, and theft of natural resources including valuable minerals, endangered animals, fish stocks and timber. Indeed, it could be argued that many of the most serious crime problems of the world are now to be found in developing countries, but these problems have received only scant attention from criminologists and crime scientists, who mostly work in developed/Westernized nations. Crime scientists have a special role to play in studying these crimes because their work is oriented to solutions and it is this kind of practical help that the developing world most needs. This special issue of the journal on crime in developing countries examines a selection of these crimes from a crime science perspective. The papers included are as follows: