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Abstract

Studies of youth offending have mostly been conducted within urban settings and have focused predominantly on individualised accounts of offending behaviour. Findings from sociological research on young people’s experiences of rurality have not been fully considered in criminological theorising of youth crime or youth justice practice. In order to address the limited understanding of ‘the rural’ in youth offending and youth justice, this small-scale qualitative study explored young people’s experiences of crime and the Youth Justice System (YJS) in one rural setting in England. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people serving a youth community sentence in this setting. Our thematic analysis revealed the dualities of young people’s experiences of rurality. First, rural spaces were perceived as both a place of sanctuary and respite and of isolation and restriction and second rural spaces provided young people with an opportunity to fly under the radar but they could equally feel hyper-visible. The findings provide an insight into how young people’s needs and development are influenced by rurality and their experiences of the YJS in a rural setting. The findings call for the distinct needs of young people within the YJS in rural settings to be better understood and for concerted efforts to be undertaken to support these young people in their desistance journeys.

Keywords

crime political ecology rurality young people youth justice system

Introduction

Many of the most frequently cited studies of youth offending (e.g. the Cambridge Study for Delinquency Development (Farrington et al., 2016), the Dunedin study (Moffitt, 2003) and the Pittsburgh Youth Study (Loeber et al., 1998)) have adopted a developmental perspective on criminal behaviour which prioritises ‘the individual’ over ‘the social’ and which marginalises the role of social situations, contexts and structures (France et al., 2012). Moffitt’s (2003) dual taxonomy theory for example, distinguishes between two trajectories of offending, adolescent limited which is primarily attributed to a lack of maturity and the mimicking of others’ behaviour and life-course persistent which is a consequence of a pathological personality (Moffitt, 2003).

The risk and protective factors for youth offending derived from these studies have significantly influenced the development of youth justice policy interventions aimed at reducing recidivism (see, for example, Farrington et al., 2016; Lipsey, 2009). Although there has been some marginal acknowledgement of variation in risk and protective factors for offending among rural and urban youth (for example, Moffitt, 2003, notes lower offending rates in rural areas and suggests that strong community networks may play a protective role) for many years limited attention was paid to the particularities of life in a rural context and more broadly the role of geography in shaping young people’s pathways into and out of crime. For example, Lipsey’s (2009) influential meta-analysis entitled ‘the primary factors that characterise effective interventions with juvenile offenders’ took into account only young people’s age, gender, race, delinquency risk, history of aggressive behaviour and their stage in the juvenile justice system.

Recently there has been a growth in studies of youth offending and youth justice in rural areas in Canada (e.g. Adorjan et al., 2017; Hepburn et al., 2022; Ricciardelli et al., 2020) Australia (e.g. Butcher et al., 2019, 2020) and the United States (e.g. Cotter and Smokowski, 2016; Pupo and Zane, 2021; Stevenson and Saulnier, 2023). However, with one or two notable exceptions (see, for example, Meek, 2006, 2008, Wooff, 2015, 2024) the rural community context is largely marginalised in theory and in research on youth offending and youth justice in the United Kingdom (Marshall et al., 2020). This article begins to address this omission in two ways: first, it provides new insights into the perceptions, actions and experiences of young people under youth justice supervision in a rural setting in England. Young people reported dualities in their experiences which could vacillate between feeling a sense of peace to feeling isolated and restricted, and sometimes perceiving themselves to be’ under the radar’ while on other occasions, hyper-visible. Second, the article illustrates the relevance of a socio-ecological approach to understanding the multiple layers of influence that shape young people’s offending behaviour and experiences of supervision in rural areas. The use of this approach revealed how young people’s experiences of space and place, and how nested ecologies (micro-, meso- and exo-systems) influenced their sense of selves and behaviour, and their experiences with their environment and communities.

The rural population in England

There are complexities in defining rurality and variations in the measures used (Barton et al., 2016). Rurality can be determined by population size within a settlement, employment in rural activities such as agriculture (Meek, 2006), or the peripherality index of a settlement – a measure of its distance from the nearest urban centre (Jonard et al., 2007). In England, the Rural-Urban classification defines areas as rural if they fall outside of settlements with more than 10,000 residents (DEFRA, 2017). Beyond differences between urban and rural settings, economic and social heterogeneities exist across rural areas, and these ‘plural rural(s)’ (Meek, 2006: 92), are often overlooked in policy for young people (National Youth Agency, 2021).

The most recent data in the Statistical Digest of Rural England (DEFRA, 2024) give an indication of the differences between urban and rural settings, and across rural settings themselves which shape young people’s lives. Relative to urban populations, the rural population comprises just 17 per cent (9.7 million) of the total population in England (56.6 million people). ‘White’ is the majority ethnic group in all areas but urban areas tend to be more ethnically diverse. The population in rural areas is on average older than in urban areas and this differential increases in the more rural areas. Only 25 per cent of the population in rural areas are under 20 years old in comparison to 31 per cent of urban areas (DEFRA, 2024), and there is notable migration by 17- to 20-year olds towards urban areas in search of education and employment opportunities.

Rural households in England have a higher average income than urban households (DEFRA, 2024) and there are fewer single parent households, partly because of a lower proportion of younger people with dependent children living in rural areas (Klett-Davies, 2016). However, while the proportion of the population living in poverty is lower in rural areas, there is heterogeneity among the rural populations with some rural communities being more economically deprived than others (DEFRA, 2024). Young people in economically deprived rural areas face particular challenges with poor digital connectivity, limited transport options and employment opportunities (Black et al., 2019).

Educationally young people in rural areas have higher levels of attainment in Maths and English GCSE in comparison to young people in urban areas, however fewer progress onto university degrees (DEFRA, 2024). Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Shucksmith, 2000) highlighted the connection between educational qualifications and job opportunities for young people in rural areas: those with higher educational qualifications were able to access national labour markets, those with lower qualifications were in low-paid local jobs. Similarly, in their study of a rural region in North England, Black et al. (2019) found that education, social class and social networks played a significant role in shaping the career paths of young people in rural areas. Young people from low-income families with few educational qualifications had limited employment opportunities and were in insecure, low-paid jobs and depended on their families for social support.

Rural youth crime and justice

Rates of recorded crime are lower in rural areas than in urban areas and rural residents report more confidence in the police than urban residents (although this level of confidence has fallen in recent years) (DEFRA, 2024). Perhaps due to lower crime rates and increased sense of community in rural settings in England, rural communities are often idealised as places of cohesion and safety (Hodgkinson, 2022) and when ‘low crime’ in rural areas is erroneously associated with having ‘no problems’ (Ceccato, 2015), an important dimension of understanding crime in rural areas is missed. For instance, on the flipside of being in a close-knit community, victims are sometimes deterred from reporting interpersonal crimes due to informal social controls, shame and a fear of being ostracised (Owen and Carrington, 2015). Furthermore, with inaccurate perceptions of rurality as a ‘holistic geography’ (Barton et al., 2016), the field of criminology has heavily relied upon urban understandings of rural crime and offenders (Abraham and Ceccato, 2022) instead of importantly considering the particularities of individual rural settings.

It is also possible that rural perspectives have also been neglected because some studies have found youth offending in urban settings to be more problematic and frequent (Sampson et al., 2018; Wikström, 2012). In actuality, a small number of studies have found rural settings to have problems surrounding the abuse of alcohol and drugs, as well as violence and crime traditionally associated with urban areas (Abraham and Ceccato, 2022; Ceccato, 2015; Mullins et al., 2001). In the United States, rural youths were as equally likely to join gangs as their urban and suburban counterparts (Watkins and Taylor, 2016). Despite these signs of converging urban and rural crime rates, prevention of crime differs vastly in rural settings. Hodgkinson (2022) highlights how preventing rural crime presents its own challenges with limited social and psychological services available, the costs and limited availability of tools typically used for situational crime preventions and difficulties in policing due to widespread areas and isolated residences.

To better understand issues relating to youth justice in rural settings, several quantitative studies have been undertaken in the United Kingdom, United States, Europe and Australia. These studies primarily sought to compare the demographic or risk and protective factors for youth offending or recidivism, between urban and rural settings (Blackmon et al., 2016; Butcher et al., 2019; Farrington et al., 2016; Mallett et al., 2013; Nelson et al., 2010). For example, Nelson et al. (2010) found that adjudicated male young people from urban and rural settings within the United States had similar risk and protective factors; however, family and school protective factors were significantly associated with reduced emotional and behavioural problems of young people in rural areas but not in urban areas. The authors attributed these findings to closer family and community networks in rural areas in the United States in contrast to urban settings. The strength of community ties in rural contexts in the United Kingdom as noted in ‘The rural population in England’ section, indicates the possibility of equivalent findings in the UK context.

The policing of young people in rural areas has also received research attention (e.g. Dwyer et al., 2015; Spencer et al., 2024; Wooff, 2015, 2024). It identifies from the police perspective the challenges of developing relevant situated knowledge in their interactions with young people in rural areas which requires significant emotional and physical labour (Wooff, 2015). These challenges are often heightened because of the frequent lack of organisational back up and resources to support rural policing. The consequences are that rural police officers may rely more on discretion and the maintenance of order through negotiation and community than in other contexts (Wooff, 2015). Young people’s perspectives of policing in rural areas have been found to be mixed (e.g. Adorjan et al., 2017; Hurst, 2007) but previous negative interactions have been found to result in lack of trust or confidence in the police and adverse views of police legitimacy (Adorjan et al., 2017; Dwyer et al., 2015).

One example of a UK study on rural experiences of young people and offending was a qualitative study by Meek (2006) who interviewed young men in prison who lived in rural England. The study revealed how challenges such as boredom, high visibility and isolation contributed to their offending behaviour and difficulties in reintegrating back into their rural communities. Some young men described how boredom led them into trouble, while others shared concerns about being excluded from the community as others would know they had been in prison. The presence of fewer services being available in rural settings for these young men further exacerbated their vulnerability upon re-entering the community. Meek proposed the need to address rural community dynamics to enhance social inclusion and to improve facilities and services for at-risk young people and ex-offenders to increase their engagement within the rural community.

It is clear that rural spaces are embodied with unique experiences and challenges and a fuller understanding of these rural community dynamics may be gleaned from sociological studies of young people’s experiences of rurality. A notable theme arising from this literature is the duality of rurality. In Norway, Laegran (2002: 158) summarised the duality as a coexistence between ‘the rural as an idyll: as beautiful, safe, healthy and harmonious; and the rural as dull: traditional, backward and boring’. A study by Tyrrell and Harmer (2015) revealed that young people who had moved from an urban to rural setting within the United Kingdom described a similar duality of feeling safe and having a good quality of life, while also feeling isolated and restricted. In addition, while close-knit communities where everyone is acquainted can contribute to a sense of safety within the community (Matthews et al., 2000), the social fabric can be perceived by young people as both caring and controlling (Rye, 2006). The lack of dedicated spaces for young people can contribute to young people feeling observed and scrutinised under the adult gaze (Matthews et al., 2000), sometimes singled out for disapproval (Powell et al., 2013). Despite the influences of such social and political processes on rural young people’s development, mainstream developmental criminology focuses predominantly on individualised accounts of offending behaviour. This neglects the multi-levelled consideration of offending behaviour as found in political ecology (France et al., 2012). Building on the model of ‘nested’ ecologies of human development by Bronfenbrenner (1979), an examination of the nested ecological relationships in influencing young people’s lives could support a better understanding of young people’s experiences of offending and youth justice in rural contexts.

An updated examination of young people’s experiences within the Youth Justice System (YJS) in rural settings in England is especially important as there has been a significant reduction in the size of the YJS and expenditure on youth services in the United Kingdom in the past decade (Bateman, 2020), which could affect rural young people’s access to these services (Marshall et al., 2020). Furthermore, the current literature on young people’s offending and under youth justice supervision in rural settings lacks a multi-levelled approach, that takes into account the wide range of influences shaping their experiences from the individual and interpersonal to the societal and structural.

Ecological theoretical framework

While much of the rural literature addresses differences as a result of geography, an ecological framework brings the multiple influences on a young person’s life into the same analytical frame and provides a means to understand how they interact. France et al. (2012: 52) draw attention to the value of including a specific ecology of place and space to our analysis of young people’s offending and youth justice experiences: ‘what is clear is that the places and spaces, as fields of practice and ecological context to young people’s social lives are complex and continually reconstituted by the power differentials embedded in them . . . places are critical to the shaping of young people’s lives, being both physically structured sites that embody, organise and transfer local knowledge about how life is (and has been)’. Their political-ecological framework builds upon Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory of human development and Bourdieu’s conceptualisations of power, habitus and field (Bourdieu, 1990). Bronfenbrenner’s theory of human development allows recognition that the everyday ‘worlds’ that young people engage with are a product of a nested set of environmental influences or ‘ecologies’. These influences comprise microsystems, meso-systems, exo-systems, macrosystems and chronosystems.

Microsystems refer to a young person’s interpersonal relationships in a particular setting. These relationships are shaped by the social roles that people take on (such as of teacher, sibling, parent) and characteristics such as gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Meso-systems refer to organisational or institutional settings (such as the school, the home, youth clubs and social groups) that young people frequent. These settings can be interconnected through individuals such as parents and teachers, youth workers, friends. Young people’s identities are negotiated through their interactions through and across these settings. Exo-systems refer to settings in which the young person is not an active participant but are influential in that they shape their everyday experiences. They include government agencies such as youth justice services, media, transport, local and recreational facilities. Macrosystems refer to the ideological or belief systems that underpin a society and which generate its norms, values, laws and regulations. They affect the everyday lives of young people through policy and public discourse including understandings of youth, crime and disorder. Bronfenbrenner’s framework also includes the chronosystem, which denotes the influence of time on the other systems. The chronosystem highlights how societal constructions, for example, of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’, ‘crime’ can change over time and result in changes to youth justice policy for example.

France et al. (2012) recognise that there is a need to explain the role of operation of power in shaping young people’s lives which Bronfenbrenner’s framework does not include. They draw on Bourdieu’s theorisation of power in social relationships and how it works to maintain and produce a certain social order. Power, according to Bourdieu, is exercised through different forms of capital – economic, cultural and social. Economic capital denotes anything that directly converts to money and includes property rights. Cultural capital refers to the cultural knowledge, skills and resources including educational or vocational qualifications that form part of a person’s identity. It confers advantage through the ownership of goods which can be transferred intergenerationally and through recognition by the society’s key institutions. Social capital refers to a person’s social resources and networks that are influential in increasing social advantage. Cultural and social capital in contrast to economic capital are embodied, they form a person’s disposition or ‘habitus’ which shapes how they view the world and engage with it. The different forms of capital are acquired, amassed and distributed in ‘fields of practice’. The authors argue that Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of power is helpful for understanding ‘the structuring of the meso-system, exo-systems and macro-systems that surround the everyday lives of young people especially in terms of how power contributes to the political discourse and practice of crime control’. They give an example that those with the greatest cultural power in rural areas are able to define norms, values and views about young people’s behaviours. Where young people are viewed as troublesome and in need of control, the cultural elites deploy their power to increase surveillance of young people and manage the public spaces young people frequent. The strength of France et al.’s analytical framework is thus its holistic vision; it illustrates how social order and control is configured and how ecological structures shape the experiences and actions of young people. In this paper we aim to illustrate how a political-ecological exploration of the experiences of young people engaged with justice services can help to better inform the understanding of youth crime in rural areas and corresponding intervention and prevention strategies.

The Current Study: Aims and Method

The current study’s overall aims were to contribute to the knowledge-base on the relationship between young people’s experiences of rurality and their offending behaviour. Its objectives were as follows: (1) to explore young people’s experiences of rurality in a region of England called ‘Fordshire’, and (2) to examine young people’s views on the nature and factors influencing their offending and interactions with the YJS, within rural settings. This study employed a cross-sectional qualitative design of semi-structured interviews with 10 young people completing an order with the YJS and living in the same rural English region: Fordshire. The sampling strategy was purposive with an element of convenience. These were all young people under the supervision of the youth justice service and who lived in a rural location within the county. As this was a qualitative study, the aim was to capture the detail of young people’s experiences rather than a broad representative overview, however, apart from the selection criteria, the number of young people recruited was limited to those who were available and willing to take part in the research at the time. The themes that emerged from the data analysis were common across the sample but it is possible that further themes and nuance would emerge from a larger sample of young people.

Participants’ demographic information are presented in Table 1. All names given, including place names, are synonyms. There were five females and five males in the study ranging in age from 13 to 17 years. The majority were White. Omar identified as Asian British and Ruby as Black African. Lexi, Ruby and Jack lived in residential care, the other seven young people lived with their families. Safi, Tim, Lexi and Ruby had come from outside of the area from urban or coastal town settings; the others were all local.

Table 1.

Participants’ demographic information.

Participant pseudonym	Sex	Age(years)	Place of origin – local/out of area (OOA)	Duration lived in Fordshire	Current residence within Fordshire	Brief nature of offence
Jack	Male	16	Local	Whole life	Care Home	Violence-related
Safi	Female	17	OOA	6 months	Family Home	Violence-related
Tim	Male	13	OOA	3 months	Family Home	Violence- and Property-related
Lexi	Female	16	OOA	15 months	Care Home	Violence-related
Ruby	Female	13	OOA	9 months	Care Home	Violence-related
Tasha	Female	16	Local	Whole life	Family Home	Violence-related
Laura	Female	13	Local	Whole life	Family Home	Violence-related
George	Male	16	Local	Whole life	Family Home	Arson
Omar	Male	17	Local	Whole life	Family Home	Sexual offence
James	Male	17	Local	Whole life	Family Home	Not known

This research received ethical approval from the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, and a county council in England. Young people were invited to participate through their YJS worker, and consent was obtained from both the young person and their parent or guardian. Interviews took place in young people’s homes, at YJS offices, or in local community centres, and each young person received a £10 shopping voucher for their participation. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. As there has been limited research on this topic, inductive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was identified as a suitable analytical method. The analysis and interpretation of the young people’s interview data were shared among the four members of the research team. Initial thematic ideas were discussed and one member drew up a first stage analysis and interpretation of the data. The team then collectively explored variations in the emerging themes by age, gender, ethnicity, whether the young person lived with their family or in residential care and whether they were local or came from out of the area. The findings were also triangulated with findings from the wider ethnographic study. Further adjustments and refinements to the themes were made by the research team members until a consensus about the core themes was reached. Our initial inductive analyses revealed the relevance of broader social, structural and environmental factors on young people’s experiences and actions and pointed strongly to the relevance of an ecological perspective for understanding their experiences and so the theoretical stage of our analysis drew on the political-ecological framework by France et al. (2012). In particular we focussed on the nested influence of these young people’s micro-, meso-, exo- and macrosystems on their perspectives of rurality, crime and supervision. The cross-cutting dimension of chronosystems was also explored, albeit to a lesser extent. We looked for patterns according to age, gender and accommodation type but the analysis did not reveal any clear trends. Recognising the differences that these demographic factors could make we consider the absence to be a likely consequence of the limited sample of participants. The influence of such factors would be worth exploring in further research and through a political-ecological lens.

Findings: The Duality of Rurality

Our findings in this research resonated with existing studies’ identification of the duality of rurality. In this section, we explore two dualities in relation to young people’s experiences of rural space, and how these dualities gave rise to their offending and experiences of youth justice. We also explore the influence of the nested ecological perspectives in explaining the themes that arose. First, rural spaces were conceived as both a place of sanctuary and respite but also as a place of isolation and restriction, and second as both a place in which they described flying under the radar and a place where they could feel hyper-visible. The dualities of rural spaces gave rise to opportunities for offending and limited pathways out of crime for young people, which the YJS’s initiatives implicitly aimed to redress.

‘Sanctuary and respite’ yet ‘isolation and restriction’

Sanctuary and respite

Various narratives in the United Kingdom have portrayed a rural life as one of ‘rural idyll’ (Halfacree, 1993; Jones, 1995) set in a natural environment of calmness and safety (Bjaarstad, 2003; Meek, 2006) and comprising a social fabric of a close-knit community (Rye, 2006). While this perception is predominantly associated with the views of adults and younger children (Meek, 2006), young people participating in this study also appreciated rural spaces as ‘peaceful’, and ‘quiet’ and valued the opportunity to be closer to nature:

That’s what I liked about [Fordshire. . .]. It’s really peaceful, it’s quiet. (George, 16)

You’d see trees, you’d see like wildlife and stuff. You could hear like birds in the background. And if you’re lucky enough in the evenings, if you go out walking in the evenings you can hear the muntjacs barking. (Laura, 13)

Yeah and I have two cousins – ’cos they’re younger than me we all go out in the grasslands and fields and we go play in cornfields and stuff . . . I’ve always like, been round my nans and like got my wellie boots on going down into the fields. (Tasha, 16)

For some young people, the move into a rural area such as Fordshire provided a kind of sanctuary and respite from busy and crowded cities:

Obviously you’re in the middle of the countryside and I had never actually seen open fields and stuff like that, and it was quite nice just to see the difference from like cars everywhere and trains and like buses everywhere [in the city]. (Safi, 16)

Or because it provided the opportunity to make a ‘fresh start’ away from the environment of their previous offending:

You get to stay out of trouble here [in Fordshire]. . . it’s just . . . you don’t have to fight to be in a gang, you don’t get judged if you’re a boy to be in a gang like. It’s alright. (Ruby, 13)

She (Mum) wanted to keep me out of trouble . . . She thought she wanted to move up here, like far. (Tim, 16)

At the microsystemic level, for some young people who had moved into Fordshire, shifting to a rural environment influenced their individual narratives and roles in being able to stay away from crime with a new start. For others, Fordshire’s vastness and tranquillity appears to have influenced young people’s meso-systemic experiences where they felt a sense of calm, peace and hope in their daily lives and interactions with others as they navigated the different settings within their rural space.

Isolation and restriction

While many described the physical landscape of rural features to be pleasant, amenities and services were reported to be inadequate, a common and concerning finding in studies of rurality (Farrugia, 2016; Looker and Naylor, 2009), with resources and opportunities such as education and employment increasingly concentrated within more urban spaces (Corbett, 2013; Shucksmith, 2004). This contributed to young people’s perceptions of rural spaces as simultaneously peaceful and pleasant yet also restricted and isolated. Tim, Jack and Safi described the difficulties they experienced as a result of a lack of access to affordable public transport:

None of them (buses) go where you want . . . They all go to the places that you don’t need ‘em to, and then they’ll put a service on for a place that you want to go for a few weeks and then they’ll cut it up. (Tim, 13)

It’s literally just the bus route and the taxis pretty much in Fordshire unless you’ve got a car or a bike . . . if you want to go anywhere you’ve got to get there and a lot of kids don’t have the money because their parents don’t have the money so they have to find their own way of getting where they want to go. (Jack, 16)

Yeah I get the college bus . . . I don’t pay for it because mum’s on benefits so I get it for free . . . It takes about an hour and a half sometimes its two hours depending on traffic . . . I don’t have money at the moment and like I only get a certain amount of money to go to college and stuff . . . We’re trying to move to Hallow because everything you need’s there like all the shops like Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s . . . Like there’s a lot more job opportunities I could do because I’ve got no transport or anything. (Safi, 17)

As Safi demonstrates, this lack of affordable public transport was particularly restricting due to its impact on young people’s ability to access job opportunities and education, both of which are important to young people’s pathways out of offending.

In addition, young people were also frustrated by the lack of leisure opportunities. As Omar described,

There’s nothing for my age group to do. . . There’s arcades, better transport links, cinemas, KFC, McDonalds, Burger King [in urban spaces]. (Omar, 17)

Similar to the findings of Meek’s (2008) study, for some participants, the experience of the rural environment of Fordshire as dull, boring and lacking in things for young people to do was seen as a contributor to their involvement in offending:

That’s one of the main problems in Fordshire as well since the youth club closed down there was a rise in the crime rates. And they cut all the funding and we had nothing to do we was going up to the main park we was just taking drugs, drinking alcohol cos there was nothing better to do. You’d go out and you’d get drunk to have fun because there’s nowhere to go to like have a couple of games of pool or have a little kick about with your friends and some staff members and stuff like that . . . And I think the violence levels have changed since I was younger . . . Because there’s less to do. (Jack, 16)

As demonstrated above, Fordshire’s isolated rural landscape was a double-edged sword, and was experienced by young people as freeing – offering peace, quiet, sanctuary and respite, and as restrictive – yet lacking easily accessible opportunities for work, education and leisure. With reference to the political-ecological approach, the limited access to transportation at the exosystemic level, impacted young people’s access to opportunities such as education and employment in their mesosystems.

These social and political processes within rural Fordshire shaped young people’s licit and illicit socialising and recreation, which were limited by the personal and community resources available to them (Bottrell et al., 2010). For some, illicit recreations such as taking drugs and getting drunk were based upon common narratives of what constituted a part of growing up in rural spaces. Others engaged in crime as a ‘creative solution’ (Bottrell et al., 2010; Meek, 2006) to quell their boredom and to experience youth culture, which contributed to their involvement in offending. The political-ecological framework describes how ‘the “blueprints” of the macrosystem shapes the ecological environment where these interactions take place’ (France et al., 2012: 28), and ‘there is a strong element within our decision-making of recognising life as “the way things are”’ (France et al., 2012: 32). Beyond individual or peer group decisions, young people’s definitions, and social norms of having fun in a rural setting can be seen as an expression of resistance against the social norms, rules and regulations that form the ‘blueprints’ of their society’s macrosystem.

A further point for future research consideration is that while isolation or peripherality of rural settlements tends to be commonly experienced by rural residents (Jonard et al., 2007), the England census measures – which informed rurality in this study – do not consider the isolation or ‘peripherality’ of a settlement. Researchers and policymakers typically depend on quantitative measures of rurality (Cromartie and Bucholtz, 2008) which can limit the depth of the analysis of the personal experiences of residents in different geographical locations (Braun et al., 2015). Given the heterogeneity that rurality can present with, future studies on rurality could further sub-divide the different types of rurality (i.e. remote-accessible) such that challenges and benefits specific to each type of rurality could be more accurately identified (Tyrrell and Harmer, 2015).

‘Flying under the radar’ yet ‘hyper-visible’

Flying under the radar

Involvement in offending was, perhaps, facilitated by perceptions of rural spaces as making it easier to hide one’s offending. As Tasha and Jack explain, the physical landscapes of rural areas – fields, back roads and woodlands – offered opportunities to carry out low level acquisitive crime undetected:

Rural areas are quite good of like hiding things up. . . ’cos there’s like loads of fields and when people like do something they go into the fields and go into woodland areas and just escape. (Tasha, 16)

When it comes to like thefts and car robberies and stuff like that I would see it as being a bit more easier in a rural area . . . the roads aren’t as busy, there’s more back roads down in the rural areas like Fordshire . . . so if you was to steal a car what you’d do is you’d steal it, the roads aren’t busy, there’s rarely any traffic, you take it along the main road to the nearest back road, down a back road and you’d hide it down there for a couple of days until it dies down with the police and stuff; and then you’d drive it out and go and sell it and make some money and that’s the money that you would use to go and entertain yourself with. (Jack, 16)

The exosystem of Fordshire was characterised by a lack of amenities which meant lower human footfall and the corresponding lack of adult surveillance. The freedom from adult surveillance contributed in part to the rural idyll perceived by young people (Tucker, 2003) as well as some of their perceptions that rural spaces could facilitate one’s ability to avoid getting caught.

Hyper-visibility and stigmatisation

However, this sense of secrecy in rural areas did not extend to young people’s use of shared public space. James emphasised that young people’s use of public facilities was in fact over-policed:

I think there isn’t any place to go really for younger people- generation. Like we have a field, uh we have a football cage, but once you get past seven o’clock and we’re still up there, the police usually get called. Yeah, so there isn’t that many places to go past that time, where I live. (James, 17)

As James’ comments indicate, interactions between police and young people in the study were often a result of reactive policing, a common phenomenon of rural policing of large rural areas with limited resources (Spencer et al., 2022; Wooff, 2015). In addition, the absence of facilities for youth has been noted as a reason for poor relations between young people and the police and rural areas in the United Kingdom (Yarwood and Cozens, 2017).

Furthermore, once young people did come into conflict with the law, many felt that they were then hyper-visible and possibly labelled or stigmatised within their rural communities. Close ties within rural settings were synonymous with less privacy and an increased scrutiny of youths, reiterating previous findings (Eriksson et al., 2010; Leyshon, 2008). The demographic make-up of rural environments with a smaller number of young people than in urban settings may also serve to make young people more noticeable. Indeed Meek (2008: 132) described how young people in rural environments ‘are highly visible and therefore potentially more readily stigmatised and marginalised than those in urban environments’.

This stigmatisation by those in power with dominant cultural capital could be greater towards and perceived more acutely by youths within the YJS, possibly reinforcing criminal identities and negatively impacting upon desistance attempts:

I used to go out quite a lot [in former urban area] but here I just think if I say something to the wrong person they’re going to judge me and everyone’s going to turn on me. Because once you say something to one person it spreads round here like everything. . . Here you’ve got shop keepers who know everyone and know everything and if you’re not a face that’s been in there before . . . their eyes are on you straight away, ‘oh she’s probably going to do something don’t know her, not seen her’ so got all cameras on you. (Safi, 17)

In Bramburn everybody knows me most of the shops know me for my stealing and stuff so as soon as I would walk into a shop they’d be, at least one or two staff members would have their eyes glued to me at all times from the moment I walk in to the moment I step out . . . it’s a bit annoying really, it’s a bit aggravating because I’m trying to change but people are still holding me against that name that I had two years ago or three years ago or whatever it was so it’s a bit, it’s a bit upsetting as well. (Jack, 16)

As demonstrated above, rural spaces only offered secrecy and anonymity up to a point. While in rural spaces, there was a sense of being free and able to evade detection, in particular from the police, once young people came into contact with the state, or even when they used community facilities or shared public spaces, they felt that they became hyper-visible to suspicious, intolerant or fearful adults within the community. The nested ecological relationships within the meso-, exo- and macrosystems of the rural geographical landscape meant that informal social controls like surveillance contributed to ‘how young people are scrutinised, categorised and dealt with’ – and not only by police’ (Bottrell et al., 2010: 66). Informal policing by community members also contributes to and reinforces adults’ expectations that these punitive measures are warranted to prevent further trouble, running the risk of leaving young people vulnerable to being targeted for any behaviour deemed wrongful by adults.

The young people’s narratives portrayed Fordshire as a place which held duality. This duality of rurality could have arisen from the power differentials that arose as a result of the varying nested influences between the macro-, exo- and meso-systems that these young people attempted to understand, explain and theorise in their everyday lives and interactions within their microsystems (France et al., 2012). Robinson (2013) describes how places are critical to shaping young people’s lives, being physically structured sites that also embody local knowledge on how life is. As these young people sought to make sense of their current realities against their past offending and future aspirations and expectations in a rural setting, ‘the dialectical relationship between the social acts of the individual and social power’ (Armstrong, 2004 quoted in Bottrell et al., 2010: 59) could also explain the tensions in the duality.

What Does This Mean for Youth Justice?

Participants’ had positive experiences with YJS who were appreciated for the space, support and guidance on offending behaviours, which were provided in a manner that did not infringe on the autonomy valued by young people (Nordfjærn et al., 2013):

They give me freedom, all I get is, just get a letter through the door when someone’s going to come round my house and see me . . . for an hour, or half an hour . . . then I can just go back out and do what I wanna do. (James, 17)

Really helpful because . . . I get on with my dad and mum but then there’s one time where I need someone to talk to that’s not my mum or my dad . . . she comes here sometimes, she takes me to McDonald’s, or Sainsbury’s. (Laura, 13)

The YJS’s provision of varied opportunities – physical, social, experiential – over time was also valued by most participants who otherwise had limited opportunities within rural settings:

I had a lot of opportunities with them. I can say that for sure that got me to understand about doing stuff in a group you don’t just have to do the crime to like to keep yourself occupied . . . like we went on a trip to mount Snowdon in Wales and we had to do teamwork for that. (Jack, 16)

With echoes of Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of social capital (Bourdieu, 1990), Eriksson et al. (2010) described how participation in organised activities may promote ‘bridging social capital’, where people of different backgrounds are connected by networks of solidarity and mutual respect for differences. The young people described the possibility of a youth club as one such option:

I would say something like a youth club being reopened because when the youth club was opened when I was about eleven or twelve I was in, I was in (school name) on and that would be the only time there, the only couple of nights of the week where everybody would come together, where everybody would mix together and there wouldn’t be any fights and there wouldn’t be any arguments because you’re all in a safe environment as it is we had no reason to argue or fight. (Jack, 16)

Although Fordshire did not have a youth club, these young people’s narratives allude to the potential of having such community facilities in rural spaces. Especially for young people within the YJS who may have been marginalised for their offending, the provision of youth services in rural settings could strengthen the social fabric between various groups sharing the same rural space and further develop these young people’s social capital.

Conclusion: Liminal Stages, Liminal Space

The findings of this small-scale study add to the evidence-base on young people’s experiences of duality in rurality and goes a step further to examine the duality in relation to crime and through a multi-levelled political-ecological framework. The value of this framework is that it demonstrates how a consideration of the influence of the duality of rurality on young people’s offending needs to move beyond understanding individual offending ecologies and instead recognising individual ecologies as nested in more distal systems. It also highlights how power functions within and across systems, shaping young people’s everyday lives through the approaches to youth justice, the surveillance of their activities in public spaces, decisions about transport networks and the provision of recreational youth facilities. It suggests the need to consider the ‘joined-up effects of distal systems both in the construction of crime as a social problem and their constitutive effects in local ecologies’ (Bottrell et al., 2010: 70). Taking it a step further, effecting change at the macroecological level requires one to shift from addressing factors around the individual and immediate ecology, to an examination of young people’s experiences of distal formative processes. At the macroecological level, the fundamental conditions and opportunities that young people face can be re-structured and changed by those who hold power (Bottrell et al., 2010).

For instance, a devotion of greater funds by rural communities towards better understanding the cultural continuities and needs of their young people, could alter the challenges and opportunities young people experience. Creating youth clubs which provide a sanctioned, uncontested and distinct youth space for young people to meaningfully occupy their time could address the rural dull (Shucksmith, 2004). As the age-crime curve posits that most offences are committed during adolescence (Farrington, 1986), the implementation of such concrete solutions at the macroecological level to meet adolescents’ needs within rural settings could reduce the propensity for involvement in antisocial behaviours.

Improving young people’s access to opportunities such as employment and education could also further expand their horizons. Within other rural settings in the United Kingdom, structural constraints such as limited employment opportunities and poor transportation have been found to limit young people’s aspirations and opportunities (Marshall et al., 2020; Spielhofer et al., 2011) Improving access to higher education within rural settings is critical as education is associated with better employment and well-being outcomes (Fleming and Grace, 2014; Watson et al., 2016). Moreover, channelling funds to improve access to education, which can also facilitate involvement with prosocial peers and meaningful activities, is consistent with a desistance-focused approach (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2020). There is also scope to consider the contribution of YJS services to rural community development.

While this study explored young people’s perceptions of crime in broad strokes, it would next be useful to explore young people’s motivations and situational antecedents within rural settings that contribute to offending behaviour, to inform intervention needs more comprehensively. Finally, research reviewing the work of YJSs across rural settings to identify the best and least helpful practices, as determined by young people and YJS workers alike, could be helpful to develop guidance for good practice when working young people in the YJS in rural settings.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Sarah Lavinia Joseph

Hannah Marshall

Caroline Lanskey

Abbie McKennan

Juliette H. Lanskey

Author biographies

Sarah Lavinia Joseph is a Lead Psychologist and Assistant Director with the Psychological and Correctional Rehabilitation Division in Singapore Prison Service. She was involved in this research as part of her MSc in Forensic Clinical Psychology at King’s College London.

Hannah Marshall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

Joel Harvey is a Consultant Clinical & Forensic Psychologist and Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London.

Caroline Lanskey is an Associate Professor in Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the Justice and Society Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Abbie McKennan is a Clinical Psychologist with over 10 years of NHS clinical and research experience mainly working with children and in forensic settings. She is currently a Clinical Tutor for the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Plymouth.

Juliette H. Lanskey is a post-doctoral researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge.

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Rurality and Crime: A Qualitative Study Exploring Young People’s Experiences in a Region of England

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The rural population in England

Rural youth crime and justice

Ecological theoretical framework

The Current Study: Aims and Method

Findings: The Duality of Rurality

‘Sanctuary and respite’ yet ‘isolation and restriction’

Sanctuary and respite

Isolation and restriction

‘Flying under the radar’ yet ‘hyper-visible’

Flying under the radar

Hyper-visibility and stigmatisation

What Does This Mean for Youth Justice?

Conclusion: Liminal Stages, Liminal Space

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iDs

Author biographies

References