University students and their perceptions of crime: Awareness of risk, behaviour and preventative strategies

This paper discusses a small research project undertaken in partnership with the organisation Crime stoppers and looks into university student’s perceptions of crime and their beliefs about what risk crimes present to them. The research strategy involved collaboration between staff and student researchers and aimed to identify whether existing crime prevention strategies at a UK University were effective as well as potentially developing other crime prevention strategies that could be advanced to protect students from becoming victims of crime. Previous research suggests that students are potentially more vulnerable to victimisation in relation to certain crimes in proportion to the general public, although this relationship is complex (McCreith and Parkinson, 2004), and that they are often unaware of institutional strategies designed to provide them with a secure environment (Barberet and Fisher, 2009). This is a problem given that knowledge about crime and the publicity of crime prevention efforts can act as an intervention in its own right (Bowers and Johnson 2003). A discussion of crime types is also likely to be an issue here, with more recent research looking beyond property crimes against students, towards hate crimes (Universities UK 2016; NUS 2010) and gender-based violence (Sundari, Anitha and Lewis 2018).