Bedömning av hoten mot den svenska landsbygden : En undersökning av brott mot svenska bönder relaterade till djurproduktion

In the discourse of crime and place, the focus has rarely fallen on rural crime. While experiencing comparably lower crime levels than urban counterparts, the common association with rural areas as being symbols of peace and friendly social interaction is not necessarily accurate. One group that often are thought of as inherently rural is farmers, who’s workplaces may possess certain unique vulnerabilities to crime compared to other locations. This thesis aims to obtain a better understanding of the threats against farmers related to animal production in a Swedish context, adding to the knowledge base regarding rural crime and sustainable development of rural and urban areas. The objectives of the study are: • to investigate the nature of the victimization of farmers devoted to animal production in Sweden, especially related the situational conditions of farms and rural areas. • to explore new data that could be used to approximate the scale of the threats against farmers using data from media archives from 2009 to 2019. This study reports types, frequency, and location of crimes against animal production with a focus on mink, rabbit and pig farms. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is used to report the geography of these offences at municipal level. The theories of the routine activity approach and situational crime prevention are used to try to explain certain conditions that may facilitate crime on farms, while the offenders are explored using the theory on techniques of neutralization. The findings of the study show that the experience of the chosen actor’s varied greatly, but with crimes such as trespassing, vandalism and theft being common types of offenses across the board. The locations of the crime events were focused in the southern to mid of Sweden. Situational conditions that may have facilitated crime includes: the large size of farms and low population density providing low detection of crime, high value targets, and relatively high accessibility to the farms. From the data, mainly three techniques of neutralization were observed to be utilized: denial of the victim, denial of injury and appeal to higher loyalties. Multiple techniques were observed to be utilized together, while simultaneously exploiting situational conditions to facilitate the neutralization