Narrating Crime Whilst Studying: How Crime Myths and Lived Experiences Shape Chinese Students’ Understandings of Crime and Safety in the UK

Abstract

International students’ stories and perceptions of crime remain an underexplored topic within the fields of crime perception and fear of crime. This article examines how Chinese international students narrate their fear and expectation of crime in the UK and explores how these narratives reflect their acceptance or rejection of dominant crime stories. Drawing on interviews with 21 Chinese students, the study employs thematic and structural narrative analysis to identify key patterns and themes in how participants anticipate, respond to, and make sense of crime in the UK. The findings reveal how differing expectations or imaginaries of crime and lived experiences intertwine to form narrative structures through which participants interpret crime and adjust their behaviour. These structures include narratives of change, narratives of continuity as well as narratives of absence of crime as a pertinent issue.

Plain Language Summary

How Chinese Students Studying in the UK Understand Crime and Safety Through Everyday Stories

This study looks at how Chinese international students understand crime and safety while studying in the United Kingdom. Many students arrive with ideas about crime that come from news, social media, family discussions, and stories shared within their communities. These ideas often shape what they expect the UK to be like. Once they begin living in the UK, they compare these expectations with their own day-to-day experiences. We spoke to 21 Chinese students at different stages of their studies. Instead of using technical language or complicated theories, the study focuses on the personal stories students told about crime and safety. Listening to these stories helps us understand how students decide what feels safe or unsafe, and how they adjust their behaviour in response. The interviews showed three main ways students make sense of crime. Some students described feeling that the UK is less or more safe than they expected, and they changed their routine behaviour. Others found that their initial views were right over time as they learned more about their surroundings and felt more settled. A third group said that crime simply did not play a big role in their lives, and they rarely thought about it. Overall, this study shows that students’ views about crime are formed through a mix of rumours, shared stories, and personal experiences. Their narratives show how expectations, emotions, and real-life encounters shape their understanding of danger and safety. These insights can help universities, support services, and policymakers provide better information and guidance for international students so that they feel more confident and secure while studying abroad.

Introduction

This study is located in the narrative criminology tradition and focuses on the role of narrative in Chinese students’ planning for and lived experiences of international mobility (Cook & Walklate, 2019, p. 244). It considers the meaning of fear and experiences of crime during a period of significant life changes and how Chinese students make sense and tell stories of crime over a period of time in the United Kingdom.

Globally, countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and France have served as major study-abroad destinations, shaping the global landscape of international student mobility and education (Glass & Cruz, 2023). In the 2023/2024 academic year, there were approximately 2.9 million higher education students in the United Kingdom, of whom approximately 730,000 (25%) were international students (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2025). Students’ study-abroad choices are shaped by information and stories from media and word of mouth, which they become “imaginative geographies” of potential destinations (Beech, 2014). The transient nature of studying abroad, embedded within broad social networks, exposes international students to shifting relationships and evolving identities, rendering their sense of security more precarious (Marginson et al., 2010, p. 53). To what extent stories and perceptions of crime and security play a role in shaping expectations and imaginative geographies of crime remains largely unexplored beyond relatively simplistic survey research, which neglects the narrative nature of how perceptions and fear of crime are constructed. Young adults, students in particular, are social groups at higher risk of criminal victimisation for a number of reasons, including lifestyle, whilst also likely to express relatively low levels of fear of crime, coupled with taking more limited security precautions (Brunton-Smith, 2011; Wattis et al., 2011). As young adults move through their university years, we expect that they may experience victimisation of different kinds and consequently, changes in their views and fear of crime.

Survey-based literature on perceptions and the fear of crime has established demographic characteristics as a key driver of differences in perceptions and levels of fear of crime, and age and gender have been identified as key demographic differentiators (Ferraro, 1995; Snedker, 2012). At the same time, debate continues over how these demographic differences should be explained. This debate includes the age–fear of crime paradox as well as more complex accounts suggesting that fear of crime across age groups may be responsive to actual crime levels. Underlying factors, such as physical vulnerability, sociability, and neighbourhood effects, also affect perceptions and the fear of crime (Snedker, 2012; Tulloch, 2000). However, cross-sectional survey research is insensitive to changes in individual views and experiences, and how previously held perceptions of crime prior to moving to a new environment, culture, and lifestyle are storied against the actual experiences of life in a new place and actual experiences of crime. Therefore, this study adopts a narrative criminology, in which narratives are not treated merely as reflections of prior attitudes or experiences, but as practical meaning-making devices through which people anticipate risk, interpret uncertainty, and orient action. In this sense, the narrative is a constitutive understanding, which means crime stories do not simply describe the world; they help reasoning and organise what counts as danger, what precautions seem reasonable, and how later experiences are understood. This perspective is particularly useful for examining international students, whose perceptions of crime are formed in the movement between mediated stories, hearsay, and lived mobility.

Perceptions of Crime Among Chinese International Students: A Narrative Exploration

Understanding of how crime is perceived and fear of crime is constructed is linked to discussions of place and public narratives – narratives that “draw on cultural texts and assumptions” (Feilzer, 2020, p. 67), and form a public’s shared understanding of a phenomenon (Peelo, 2005). People rarely form perceptions of crime based purely on personal experience; instead, they rely heavily on shared stories and circulating explanations that tell them what to fear and why (Feilzer, 2020). It is in this context that crime myths become relevant. Defined as “some of the collective definitions society applies to certain crime problems and their solutions.” (Kappeler & Potter, 2017, p. 2), crime myths represent powerful public narratives that shape how people make sense of crime and the personal risks it may pose. As socially constructed accounts, these myths travel widely through media, including social media, where they gain familiarity through repetition, and sometimes uncritical acceptance, even when they contain distortions or fabricated claims (Robinson, 2000). When crime becomes associated with particular places, such narratives can crystallise into place-myths, which are culturally shared labels that identify certain locations as safe or unsafe (Wattis et al., 2011). Such narratives are not universal, they are shaped by cultural and personal background, and thus they can differ across social groups, gender, and ethnic backgrounds. Additionally, dominant discourses can be disrupted by the emergence of “real” threats and L. Sandberg and Tollefsen (2010)’s research in Sweden focussed on how stories of fear of crime in public places were reshaped by the emergence of a specific and temporal criminal threat to women. This disruption led to different stories narrated by women and men but nonetheless — at least in the cases of female interviewees — reproduced coherent gendered narratives of fear. In the case of male interviewees, stories were more fragmented and diverse and were adapted to fit the context of a changed but dominant discourse of a specific threat posed by a violent male offender (L. Sandberg & Tollefsen, 2010).

In this study, the focus is on exploring the stories of crime in the UK told by Chinese international students. For Chinese international students, English-speaking countries are their top study abroad choice, and the UK has long been the second-largest study abroad destination after the US (Center for China and Globalization, 2025). For the host country, Chinese students make up a significant proportion of international students in the UK, in 2023/24, they made up nearly a quarter of non-EU students and totalled just under 150,000 students (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2025). While, there is some international research on students’ perceptions of crime, encompassing a range of topics such as views on campus safety (Chekwa et al., 2013), perceived individual capacity of protection (Schafer et al., 2018), and risk reduction and prevention strategies for victimisation (Jennings et al., 2007); there is virtually no research on the perceptions and fear of crime of this particular group of students, yet there are reasons to believe that their sense of safety may be disrupted by new and unfamiliar environments (Shi, 2021).

International students have to consider a multitude of new challenges and environments, and personal safety is clearly a consideration for many when choosing study destinations (British Council, 2015). However, a largely overlooked population (Bonistall Postel, 2017), and “research on international students is surprisingly rare in fear of crime studies, and thus, it is currently unclear whether they are more afraid abroad than at home, and if so, what explains their elevated fear” (Shi, 2021, p. NP2485). In explaining the lack of research in this field, Xiong et al. (2017) emphasise that host-country governments and educational institutions generally worry that documenting international students’ victimisation experiences and fear of crime may have negative effects on the international education market. The few empirical studies examining international students’ perceptions and fear of crime suggest that in particular ethnic minority international students express higher levels of fear of crime than their local counterparts (Boateng & Adjekum-Boateng, 2017), and that there are important differences between international students’ levels of fear of crime based on their country of origin, living circumstances, English proficiency and exposure to stories of victimisation, etc (Xiong et al., 2017). When considering the origins of such perceptions, the role of the media in influencing perceptions of crime, is widely discussed in fear of crime research, but less so in the context of international students (Shi, 2021). However, the lack of familiarity with new study destinations will encourage students to seek out traditional media and even more so social media, with the aim of understanding levels of crime in the unfamiliar destination. Such searches may lead to elevated exposure to crime stories and crime myths as Chinese students lack personal reference points to assess risk of crime (Green et al., 2015; Mutongwizo, 2010). Thus, Chinese students’ general perception of crime in the UK may well be affected by crime myths circulating on social media platforms.

The multiple challenges, such as geopolitics, differences in lifestyle and cultural norms, and new educational experiences, faced by international students begin in their home countries and continue until they arrive at higher education institutions in host countries (Ramachandran, 2011). Then, after arriving in the host countries, when adapting to a new cultural environment, students also reflect on the influence of their home country’s cultural and social norms (Bonistall Postel, 2017). The tensions and discomfort arising from cultural conflict exacerbate the vulnerability of international students (Forbes-Mewett, 2020), and are expected to impact their perceptions and fear of crime. Additionally, most international students do not possess the forms of cultural capital commonly held by local students in English-speaking contexts, namely, strong English proficiency and a solid understanding of the host country’s social and cultural environment (Tran, 2016). Consequently, compared with domestic students, they lack equivalent support structures to offset the absence of guardianship, and even where such systems are available, international students often refrain from seeking assistance (Forbes-Mewett & McCulloch, 2016). While Chinese international students may reference dominant discourses, how they position their own views and experiences within or against those discourses is unclear (L. Sandberg & Tollefsen, 2010). Additionally, lived experiences in the host country may alter perceptions of crime, but how these perceptions change with experience remains underexplored in the relevant literature. Understanding fear of crime in the context of seeking out information on a new environment, moving into that new environment and experiences of life there, and then making sense of these experiences requires a narrative approach capable of capturing the temporal element of individual storytelling, change, and a wider societal storied positioning. As S. Sandberg (2022, p. 213) argues, “while the paradigmatic logic conveys knowledge through systematic reasoning, narratives convey knowledge by placing insights into specific experiences.” Listening to Chinese international students talk about perceptions and experiences of crime offers a new and unique insight into an under-researched phenomenon, but will also allow a contrast with dominant discourses of fear of crime, which may not fit the Chinese student experience.

Methods

The data for this study come from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2025 with 21 Chinese students who had diverse learning experiences at universities in the United Kingdom. Their learning experiences included pursuing academic degrees, visiting programmes, and volunteer placements. Participants were recruited through posters on campus, university mailing lists, Chinese social media and student networks, and snowball sampling. Participation was voluntary and self-selected, and no gender-based quotas were applied during recruitment. The participants consisted of 18 females and 3 males, aged between 22 and 35. Except for one participant who had studied in the United Kingdom 5 years ago, all others were either currently enrolled in studies or had completed their studies at a UK university within the past two years. Participants represented experiences across 14 different universities and cities across England, Wales, and Scotland. Research on fear of crime finds that women report higher perceived vulnerability than men and may be more willing to articulate concerns about crime and personal safety, whereas men more often frame themselves as less vulnerable or express fear less directly (Snedker, 2012). From this perspective, it is plausible that women were more inclined to volunteer for interviews on crime-related experiences and perceptions. At the same time, this interpretation remains tentative, as the present study did not systematically examine gendered differences in recruitment pathways or willingness to participate. This should be kept in mind when interpreting the findings.

Interviews were semi-structured in format and ranged from 30 to 83 min in length (average approximately 48 min). Researchers conducting bilingual qualitative studies emphasise the importance of eliciting narratives in participants’ original language to preserve contextual nuance and reduce the risk of misinterpretation (Schumann et al., 2025). Consistent with existing research on Chinese populations, interviews in this study were conducted in Chinese and subsequently transcribed. This approach, however, necessarily introduces methodological considerations concerning how interview texts can be translated in ways that maintain their original meaning, tone, and narrative coherence. More specifically, the interview transcripts were anonymised and subsequently translated into English with the assistance of the generative AI tool ChatGPT. Its use was strictly limited to the translation of interview transcripts to address linguistic barriers in cross-cultural research collaboration. Although ChatGPT is not specifically designed as a translation system, applied linguistics research suggests that its performance has reached a level comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, that of established machine translation tools such as Google Translate and DeepL (Lee, 2024). However, to reduce the risk of meaning loss during translation (Gawlewicz, 2016), and in line with scholarship highlighting the analytical advantages of the researcher–translator dual role (Turhan & Bernard, 2022), the first author systematically reviewed and revised all translated transcripts to ensure accuracy and contextual fidelity.

While the practical benefits of generative AI for qualitative empirical research are increasingly evident, its use remains a critical, ethical concern. During the translation process, the ChatGPT setting “improve the model for everyone” was disabled, ensuring that no research data were uploaded for model training. All interview materials were fully anonymised prior to processing, in accordance with ethical approval requirements on confidentiality. In the findings section, to preserve anonymity, the interviewees have been given pseudonyms and only their gender and age are noted as well as a location marker (the city of the interviewee’s most recent educational experience).

This study applies the analytical framework of narrative criminology (Presser & Sandberg, 2018) to explore how Chinese students construct narratives around perceptions and experiences of crime in the United Kingdom. More specifically, it employs thematic and structural narrative analysis, which differs from conventional thematic analysis in qualitative research by incorporating complete stories within its analytic process (S. Sandberg, 2022). Narratives can be conceptualised in multiple ways, yet most definitions highlight two key dimensions: temporality, in which one event follows another, and causality, in which one event gives rise to the next (S. Sandberg, 2022). When temporality, causality, and storyline intertwine to define a narrative framework, it becomes clear that the timeline itself also warrants emphasis. Hence, this study also emphasises the temporal dimensions of participants’ perceptions of crime pre-arrival and their later lived experience in the United Kingdom. Timelines mark significant life events, turning points, and contextual surroundings, with events, experiences, and narrative details collectively used to construct them (McGrath & Lhussier, 2025).

Table 1 illustrates the specific themes contained within each narrative structure and uses a timeline perspective to capture the changes (or continuities) under each theme, thereby constructing a Crime Perception Matrix. The findings section will discuss each narrative structure and theme in detail by drawing on excerpts from interviews, which offer specific examples.

Table 1.

Structures–Main Themes - Crime Perception Matrix.

Structures	Main themes	Before coming to the United Kingdom	Experiences in the United Kingdom
Narratives of change	1. Myth-busting (N = 6)	Perceived insecurity	Perceived security
	2. Learning to be cautious (N = 4)	Perceived security	Perceived insecurity
Narratives of continuity	3. Continuous security (N = 4)	Perceived security	Perceived security
	4. Continuous vigilance (N = 3)	Perceived insecurity	Perceived insecurity
Narratives of absence	5. When crime is a story only (N = 4)

Note. N represents the number of interviewees for each theme.

Research Findings

The study reveals participants’ individual differences in the perception of crime in the United Kingdom. Based on their perceptions of crime prior to moving to the UK and their subsequent individual experiences in the United Kingdom, their understanding of crime and safety exhibits three narrative structures. Each structure, with its underlying narrative themes, reflects a different pattern of meaning.

Narratives of Change: From Myth to Reality

Narrative Theme 1: Myth-busting

International students often make a series of preparations for cross-cultural transitions in order to manage their international experience before going abroad to study (Arthur, 2017). Before planning to arrive in the United Kingdom, Qijia Li (Female, aged 33, Bangor) had no strong anxieties about crime as she associated the UK with economic development and political stability. Previous studies about push-and-pull factors for international students also suggest that developed countries are more attractive to international students due to their sense of safety (Lin & Liu, 2023). However, in the final weeks before departure, various messages from peers began to create a sense of anxiety around the risk of victimisation:

I always thought the UK was pretty developed, like, the economy is good, so it shouldn’t be too chaotic or anything. But right before I was about to leave. . . uh. . . some classmates in the WeChat group told me there are a lot of drunk people on the trains, like, people drinking and getting wasted. So then I went online and did a bit of searching, like on social media and stuff. Turns out, things here are actually kinda similar to a lot of other European countries. Like. . . em. . . there are quite a lot of people who steal or rob, I mean, petty theft is super common. (Qijia Li)

International students’ decisions and choices regarding their study destinations are often dominated by various sources of information, including but not limited to peers, parents, social media, and educational institutions (Wang & Crawford, 2020). Such impressions of crime, circulated through hearsay storylines among students and digital spaces, formed an anticipatory framework marked by ambiguity, fear, and qualified belief. When people hear rumours from those who have shared experiences with them, these rumours become credible, and once people believe them, they may have certain negative impacts (Thomas, 2007). Here, Qijia indicates attempts to research crime prevalence on the internet, primarily on social media, and she gains a sense of a common threat of petty theft and a lack of safety on public transport. She later recalled:

And they said [referring to a WeChat group], “Huh? You will take the train alone (in UK)? That’s dangerous!” something like that. They made it sound like. . . yeah, the trains aren’t safe at all (in UK). (Qijia Li)

Despite not fully trusting these accounts, Qijia chose to act on them, changing her behaviour to avoid perceived risks of crime. In her words, believing these narratives was like “gambling” — they might be exaggerated, but the potential consequences were not worth the risk. Therefore, when she first arrived in the United Kingdom and her plane landed, she chose to take an expensive taxi for about one and a half hours instead of taking the train to her university, and she suggested there was no choice, saying:

At the time, it really felt like. . . I had to take a taxi. Like I had to get from point A to point B safely, no matter what. Otherwise, I didn’t know what might happen, even for just a short trip, there was that fear, even if just a little. (Qijia Li)

However, subsequently, her story reflects a broader myth-busting structure, where perceived safety threats are initially internalised, even acted upon, only to be gradually disconfirmed through lived experience. After a year of independent travel across the United Kingdom, Qijia revised her earlier assumptions:

Sense of safety now? Hmm. . . I don’t really feel unsafe or anything. . .I often took trains alone in the UK. I didn’t feel the same way as others have described, and there weren’t any safety concerns. At least, I didn’t encounter any offence on trains. (Qijia Li)

Different cultures have complex understandings of the perception of safety, and being in an unfamiliar cultural environment can affect students’ sense of security and level of safety (Forbes-Mewett & Nyland, 2008). Studying abroad is inherently full of uncertainties (Shen et al., 2023), and in this narrative structure, the initial precautions that participants adopted were part of a protective strategy to reduce anxiety and uncertainty. Nevertheless, it was eventually re-evaluated and discarded through repetition of uneventful experiences. Hence, Qijia’s trajectory is echoed in some other accounts that share a common belief, “it’s actually a bit better than I expected.” (Tianyu Fang, female, aged 22, London). These stories reveal how fear narratives can initially shape perception and behaviour, but also how personal experience may override or dismantle previous perceptions. Here, perceptions do not change all at once, but are assembled gradually over time through contradiction, reflection, and routine life.

Narrative Theme 2: Learning to be Cautious

A different trajectory had interviewees expressing a strong belief in “learning to be cautious.” Interviewees falling into this theme held a strong belief in the safety of the UK before their departure from China. Whether through social media, word-of-mouth channels, or a myth that developed countries are safe societies, they perceived the UK as a safe society. They held high expectations for studying in the United Kingdom and their personal safety, but their attitudes changed due to individual experiences (Newsome & Cooper, 2016). Xiaoqin Gao (Female, aged 30, Birmingham) noted that the stereotypical image of Britain she believed in simply did not include the element of crime.

Before I came to the UK, the stereotypes I had of Britain had nothing to do with crime. Most of the information I got was from TV dramas or Weibo; there wasn’t even TikTok back then. And the Weibo posts were either official embassy messages or celebrity gossip about the UK. So I had no concept at all of how safe or unsafe it might be. . . You could say my expectation for safety was zero cause I didn’t think about it. (Xiaoqin Gao)

Later, during her time living in the United Kingdom, Xiaoqin experienced a serious physical assault in a cinema and was taken to the hospital for treatment. She recalled that, as an international student, she was also under the pressure of completing her dissertation during that period, which made the experience even more traumatic. It took her more than three months to recover from the incident. Reflecting on that experience, she remarked, “in fact, we’re [Chinese students] a vulnerable group in the UK” (Xiaoqin Gao). So, when comparing her earlier perceptions with her experiences after arriving in the United Kingdom, she said:

So the information itself might be true, but it’s selectively presented. And when you don’t know that, you get influenced by it and start forming stereotypes about a country or a city. (Xiaoqin Gao)

She believes that even before coming to the United Kingdom, it is difficult for people to access the full truth from the information they receive. Therefore, she believes that only personal experience can reveal authenticity. Real-life experience can reflect a more accurate understanding of crime and risk perception (Solymosi et al., 2015). Therefore, victim experiences can shape a higher perceived fear of crime, especially when physical violence is involved (Noble & Jardin, 2020). Thus, some participants reflected that receiving more and better security-related information before arriving in the UK would help people take precautions. Another participant, Yiwen Chong (Female, aged 35, London), felt deeply shocked by her past experiences as a victim of several property crimes. She regretted not paying attention to stories about crime and safety in the United Kingdom before coming, saying: “If I’d known, then when these things happened, I wouldn’t have been so shocked.” (Yiwen Chong)

After graduating last year, Xiaoqin became a lecturer at a British university. In her current role, she works with Chinese international students and shares her own experiences of crime prevention and self-protection with newly arrived students.

That’s something I always tell my students in orientation classes each year, but I can only reach around 200 of them. . . We’re all adults studying abroad. I can only tell people what the risks are and give them some advice, whether they take it or not is up to them. (Xiaoqin Gao)

In recounting their experiences, interviewees often assumed an advisory role, transmitting emotions or practical suggestions to others to help share relevant information and inform recipients’ way of thinking about crime and safety (Pemberton & Aarten, 2018). From a narrative-functional perspective, victimisation not only shapes individual perceptions of risk but also generates new crime stories that are circulated, retold, and repurposed as cautionary advice. Individually, retelling of adverse experiences in a form that highlights its positive effects may help process and move on from difficult events (Truncellito & VanEpps, 2023).

Narratives of Continuity: Stability Across Borders

Narrative Theme 3: Continuous Security

In contrast to interviewees who revised their perceptions of crime in the United Kingdom after encountering victimisation or its absence in contradiction of prior expectation, another narrative theme portrays safety from crime as a stable and enduring assumption. Participants within this theme neither actively sought information about crime before their arrival nor significantly altered their views after living in the United Kingdom. Their sense of security remained largely intact, bolstered by an ongoing process of narrative neutralisation in which potential risks were minimised, rationalised, or dismissed as irrelevant (Junger, 1987). Therefore, before departure, participants such as Shiya Ren (Female, aged 27, London) and Ling Huang (Female, aged 34, Cambridge) reported that safety simply was not a salient concern. Their lack of attention to crime did not stem from denial or deliberate avoidance, but rather from a broader assumption that the UK was “not that dangerous.” Shiya argued that:

Honestly, I didn’t really pay much attention to safety. I just thought, well, it’s not like I’m going to the US, they’ve got guns there, the UK seemed okay, not that dangerous. (Shiya Ren)

Likewise, as Ling explained, “I wasn’t too worried. What I worried more about was whether I could adapt quickly in a new place. Safety wasn’t a big concern for me.” This suggests that, for these participants, crime did not occupy a prominent place in their emotional or informational landscape prior to studying abroad. Then, post-arrival in the United Kingdom, these assumptions were largely sustained. Although participants acknowledged that incidents of crime occasionally circulated within Chinese student networks on platforms like WeChat, they rarely interpreted these events as personally relevant. Shiya noted:

Elephant and Castle is a big international student area, so whenever something bad happens, it spreads really fast on WeChat or social media. I’d usually see it, but I never actually witnessed anything myself. (Shiya Ren)

As a way of constructing and presenting social reality, the information received is not necessarily wrong (Wu, 2018) but firsthand experience is more crucial for the participants in this narrative structure, because experience, as part of daily life, brings more subjective authenticity. The absence of direct victimisation reinforced their original beliefs: “I know stuff happens a lot, but I never felt it was that dangerous.” (Shiya Ren). This narrative structure is underpinned by a process of normalisation through rationalisation, for example, unfortunate victims (Wrede & Mac Giolla, 2021). As Shiya remarked, “Some people have really bad luck, they get mugged or have their stuff stolen, and then they never feel safe again.”. Here, the risk is externalised, detached from the speaker’s imagined self, and re-narrated as being “lucky (or not).” Crime becomes something that happens to others, not a structural feature of place, but a chance occurrence outside the norm (Egan & Wilson, 2012). Rather than challenging or revising their sense of place, participants drew on both pre-arrival assumptions and uneventful lived experience to construct a stable emotional geography of safety.

Furthermore, the sense of security cultivated through experience can also be conveyed to others through storytelling. However, unlike previous themes, such a narrative does not function as a warning, but rather as a positive signal that comforts others. So Shiya stated that “But I told them, it’s honestly not that bad. If it were that scary, people wouldn’t keep coming here to study, right? ”

Narrative Theme 4: Continuous Vigilance

This narrative theme is shaped by a persistent attentiveness to personal safety, both prior to and throughout the experience of studying in the United Kingdom. Unlike the reassured calm of those in the continuous security theme, participants within this category demonstrate a form of continuous vigilance, which is a deliberate stance towards potential danger. This theme does not present individuals as gripped by fear but rather as approaching crime as a calculable risk that can be avoided (Chan & Rigakos, 2002). As such, their narratives are saturated with caution and anticipatory logic.

Zhewen Yin (Female, aged 27, Bangor) described her concern as emerging from macro-level comparisons between countries. “Well. . . it was more about the crime rate, or the idea that it’s less safe, relatively speaking. Like, compared with mainland China.” Here, the risk of crime is not perceived as abstract, but as measurable, structurally and comparatively located. Similarly, Jianguo Li’s (Male, aged 30, Glasgow) narrative illustrates how pre-arrival risk perception directly shaped his behaviour. He actively sought visual information through YouTube videos, “you’ll find videos made by local residents” (Jianguo Li), to assess the safety of university areas, incorporating egohoods — personalised assessments based on residential location — of crime and security into the spatial imagination (Glas et al., 2019). As the argument that treats the fear of crime as a social fact emphasises, the structural characteristics of a city comprising sites and situations influence perception and fear of crime (Liska et al., 1982). So, more strikingly, he physically visited cities he considered studying in, conducting what he called a fieldwork of local safety:

I’m really not the “fearless” type, I always go visit in person before choosing a university. For Cardiff, I stayed there for three or four days, walked around the city to get a feel for how safe it was, and only then decided to apply. I did the same for most of my master’s university. I’m definitely someone who values my life (laughs). (Jianguo Li)

This heightened state of vigilance did not dissipate upon arrival in the United Kingdom. Instead, it was validated through lived experience. Jianguo recounted an incident shortly after arrival, where he was harassed by a group of young men who questioned his sexuality in a manner he perceived as threatening.

. . .as I was walking home from university, three men, I think they were high school students or a little older, or maybe unemployed. . .. They asked me, “Are you gay?” My first reaction was: are these three guys going to rape me? (Jianguo Li)

The event did not shift his perception of the UK as dangerous, but rather confirmed it:

It’s pretty much what I expected, dangerous. At first, I thought maybe I was overthinking it, or that social media was exaggerating things. But after coming here, I realised, it really is dangerous. (Jianguo Li)

Such a narrative structure stands in sharp contrast to the myth-busting or continuous security themes. Where others found their fears unfounded or their surroundings manageable or the reverse, participants like Jianguo anchored their perception of danger in continuous and consistent discursive and embodied experience. The result is a sustained theme of vigilance, one that not only frames crime as likely and proximate but also justifies ongoing efforts to mitigate risk through adaptation. Therefore, for these participants, “safety was almost the most important factor.” (Jianguo Li)

Narratives of Absence: When Crime is a Story Only

Narrative Theme 5: When Crime is a Story Only

If the previous narrative structures have traced how perceptions of crime change or remain stable, the final type offers a different narrative logic altogether, one of narratives of absence. For participants in this group, crime and safety are simply not matters of personal relevance. The issue of “Is the UK safe?” appears to be, at best, a speculative curiosity. The risk of crime does not penetrate their daily thinking, emotional landscape, or behavioural routines. Binjia Liang (Male, aged 25, Bangor) illustrates this stance with striking clarity. When asked whether he had concerns about safety before coming to the UK, he laughed:

Me? I’m not afraid of anything. But my family worries. Actually. . . it’s just my mum. My dad doesn’t worry. . .But my mum always. . . well, I’ve got a little brother, seven years old, and my mum seems to forget. She always thinks of us together, like me and him are the same. She treats me like I’m still the second kid. But come on, I’m 25 already, how can that be the same? Hahahaha. (Binjia Liang)

Humour and laughter are regarded as having existential significance as a narrative function in criminology (S. Sandberg & Tutenges, 2019). From this point, it shows that Binjia’s tone is marked by humour and detachment, signalling how distant the subject of crime feels to him. He frames concerns about safety as something external, projected onto him by others, especially family members, rather than something internally felt. Similarly, Qin Yao (Female, aged 23, Manchester) remarked:

I feel like, for example, phone thefts are pretty rare in China now. But in the UK, apart from London, a lot of places are kind of like the border between urban and rural, you see quite a few homeless people on the streets, it’s pretty common. But I wouldn’t say the public security there is really bad. It’s more like a normal social phenomenon, if that makes sense. (Qin Yao)

Crime is acknowledged but not moralised or feared. It becomes part of the urban texture which is something embedded in the background of modern life (Felson & Boba, 2010, pp. 203–206). For participants like Qin and Binjia, stories about crime, whether true or fabricated, are consumed with a mix of indifference and humour. This affective stance allows them to interact on topics about safety and fear in a relaxed and socially acceptable manner (S. Sandberg & Tutenges, 2019). This is especially evident in Lili Cui’s (Female, aged 26, London) narrative:

Once they sent me a story about someone downstairs at Harrods carrying this massive medieval sword, trying to attack people. I don’t even know if it was true or not. It was just so ridiculous. I actually kind of wanted to go and see it (laughs). . .Gun crimes don’t even sound “cool” to me, I actually find those medieval-style images of people swinging swords to attack others more absurd and kind of funny. (Lili Cui)

This framing renders crime not as threat but as spectacle. For Lili, even her own victimisation, a purse-snatching incident in London, is reframed as emotionally stimulating, “it actually feels kind of thrilling” (Lili Cui). These accounts show not only a resistance to fear but also a disinterest in adopting any formal stance on the issue of public safety. As Lili noted, when hearing others express anxiety about going out at night, she struggled to empathise: “I honestly don’t really understand what they’re afraid of.” Gabriel and Greve (2003) distinguished fear of crime into situational fear and dispositional fear, then the latter reflects a trait in one’s perception of crime, risk, and safety. It represents an individual’s personality tendency. Therefore, in this narrative structure, participants’ overall attitude tends to be summarised as: “I’m not the kind of person who feels insecure.” (Binjia Liang)

Discussion and Conclusion

This study extends discussions on perception of crime among international students in the UK, an underexplored population within the broader literature on fear of crime, and perceptions of safety and risk (Shi, 2021). By employing a narrative analytical approach (S. Sandberg, 2022), it examined how Chinese students construct and reconstruct their understandings of crime and safety through their mobility. Three main narrative structures were identified, representing narratives of change, continuity, and absence, each capturing different modes of engagement with crime discourse. Consistent with a constructivist view of social scripts (Vera-Gray et al., 2021), these findings suggest that individual perceptions of crime are not simply reflections of objective risk or results of uncritical adoption of crime myths, but are narratively constituted through the interpretive resources and social contexts available to narrators. In this sense, narratives are not merely representational but constitutive, which means they bring into being the very realities of risk and safety that narrators inhabit and act upon. This context includes questions of gender and the overrepresentation of female stories in our study should be noted. However, given the themes emerging and the insights set out below, we do not feel that this had a significant impact on the research findings.

The first insight concerns how rumours, partial truths, and blending of fact and fiction shape perceptions of crime, and if and how direct experiences of crime modify them. Before and after arriving in the United Kingdom, participants encountered diverse crime stories, such as online exaggerations, peer anecdotes, and informal everyday accounts, through which they formed initial “crime myths” or expectations of crime in the United Kingdom. Crucially, they rarely judged these stories simply as true or false; what mattered was their narrative utility. Thus, sensational posts could be treated as unreliable yet still justify avoidance and shape behaviour [Qijia Li], while news reports could feel persuasive precisely because they were assumed credible [Xiaoqin Gao]. Participants therefore relied on narrative reasoning, through which stories did not merely inform judgments about crime but helped organise what counted as prudent action under uncertainty. As Barrera (2019, p. 39) notes in his discussion of narrative approaches to criminal justice, this reflects “a quasi-causal model of action, “whereby “narrative mediates description and prescription of action”. Stories become tools for navigating unfamiliar environments (Bietti et al., 2019), by placing listeners inside imagined future scenarios and encouraging to take preventative action.

However, narrative reception is more complex than often assumed. Although revising first impressions is linked to cognitive capacity (De keersmaecker & Roets, 2017), mixed truth–falsehood stories can remain influential because they are regarded as real enough to help manage risk when stable reference points are missing. While realist perspectives stress the importance of real crime events, it is equally important to recognise the symbolic role of myths, narratives, and meaning-making in everyday interpretation (Lupton & Tulloch, 1999). Experience can revise perceptions formed through prior narratives, but not automatically. Narrative reception is selective, and later events reshape views only when they can be incorporated into a coherent personal storyline: for some, uneventful routines accumulated into a turning point that weakened earlier fears; for others, victimisation or witnessing incidents reinforced anxiety and vulnerability. Yet some participants reported no meaningful change: those oriented to caution read the absence of harm as proof that vigilance worked, while those who normalised crime continued to downplay incidents even when encountering them. Overall, experience is filtered through pre-existing narrative frameworks, and its impact depends on how it is integrated into an unfolding storyline.

This leads to the second theoretical insight of this study, which is the importance of temporality of narrative interpretation in crime perception. Within narrative criminology, the concept of the narrative arc underscores the centrality of time in shaping meaning (Presser, 2009; S. Sandberg, 2022). Crime perception does not exist as a fixed cognitive state; rather, it unfolds over time, with its stability or volatility shaped by how events are temporally positioned within a story. Narratives of change demonstrate that perceptual shifts depend less on events themselves than on how individuals retrospectively organise and reinterpret experience. When an incident is narrated as a turning point, it acquires transformative significance (Wieslander & Löfgren, 2025). Change, therefore, is not merely a response to events but a reconfiguration of narrative structure, in which earlier and later moments are repositioned into newly meaningful relations. Conversely, narratives of continuity reveal that stability is also narratively produced. Individuals sustain existing perceptions by repeatedly anchoring new information to familiar interpretive frameworks. Once a storyline becomes intertwined with one’s judgments or experience, subsequent experiences are often absorbed into its trajectory. The persistence of crime perception thus reflects not the durability of facts but the durability of narrative structures that organise experiences across time. As Somers (1994, p. 614) argued, “experience is constituted through narrative”. Narrative, then, functions not merely as a medium of expression but as a constitutive mechanism — one that brings cognitive and social order into being, rather than simply recording it. In line with broader scholarship on narrative stability and transformation, this perspective advances a more nuanced understanding of how continuity and change coexist and interact (Vaara et al., 2016).

The third theoretical insight extends this argument by exploring narratives of absence as a distinct mode of meaning-making. Existing discussions of “absence” within narrative criminology, particularly in relation to unsaid narrative, tend to conceptualise absence as ideological silence, namely, the exclusion of structural inequalities, subordinated voices, or material conditions from dominant discourse, thereby naturalising power relations and legitimising harm (Presser, 2019, 2023). Comparatively, this study reorients the analysis from discursive omission in hegemonic knowledge production to experiential and narrative absence. Related work on fear narratives also suggests that absence can take the form of narrative thinness, where, in the absence of available cultural scripts, accounts become hesitant, partially untellable, and structurally incomplete, often lacking an evaluative point (L. Sandberg & Tollefsen, 2010). Yet from a constitutive standpoint, even the absence of narrative is consequential: what is not narrated is also not constituted as a social problem, a moral injustice, or a call to action. It demonstrates that absence can operate as a narrative stance, that is, crime may be cognitively acknowledged yet deprived of emotional salience, moral urgency, or behavioural consequence.

Overall, this study shows that crime perception among mobile international students is best understood as narrative work, namely, people draw on available stories to make risk intelligible, revise meanings over time, or render crime affectively inconsequential through absence. Future research can build on this by tracing how these narrative structures shift across different migrant groups, locales, and stages of settlement. Policy-wise, universities and local agencies should treat safety communication as a narrative intervention, which means curbing misinformation without fuelling panic, and providing accessible reporting and support pathways that help students translate experiences into actionable, confidence-building understandings.