Rural offenders and victims experience the same sorts of crime as their urban neighbours, but studies have found that the context and meaning of those crimes differ dramatically. Specifically, rural victims are vastly more affected by certain crimes, just as rural offenders are vastly more enabled to commit them.

These differences in experience of crime are due, primarily, to the tropes or rhetorical devices used to depict and to understand rural crime. Drawing upon research by Moody (2002), Marshall and Johnson (2005) and Youngsen et al (2021), the following five sections are the most important responses to rural crime. These tropes underpin the very different relationship rural people have with certain crimes to that of the urban population. They serve to create the figure of the victim and offender and to make sense of crime and criminal behaviour in rural areas.

‘It couldn’t happen here’

This response is very common in rural areas when crime, particularly violent crime, occurs. This disbelief serves to mark that crime is a rarer experience in the country than the city. The occurrence of crimes such as murder, rape and sexual assault create a large amount of publicity in and of themselves and, when they occur in a rural setting, they create a bombshell event from which escape is impossible. Victims must work through their recovery whilst centre-stage to a mainstream news cycle and overwhelming interest from those living in the locality who know them personally.

Rural offenders, likewise, are forced into public life amid either a hostile or a disbelieving community. These offenders compel citizens in rural localities to accept that there is a dark underbelly to the rural and that, indeed, such crimes can and do ‘happen here’. An alternative oppositional mentality can argue for the offender’s innocence, with rural citizens offering support and denouncement of the victim’s behaviour. This cycle then has enormous effect in limiting and even derailing that victim’s possible recovery.

‘We look after our own’

Rural communities are frequently praised for their tight-knit nature, where everyone supports each other. However, whilst this may have been the situation for some rural communities in the past, it is no longer viable.