Crimes Against Animal Production: Exploring the use of Media Archives

Abstract

Swedish media have revealed an increase in crimes against animal production (CAAP) in the last decade. We investigate the nature of such crimes (especially against mink, pig, and rabbit farms), with a focus on those crimes whose suspects are animal rights groups by utilizing data from media archives from 2009 to 2019. Newspaper articles show that while vandalism and trespassing are often committed against mink farms, property crimes occur more often against pig and rabbit farms. Because there are indications that crime suspects are not a homogeneous group and express different motivations to commit CAAP, a multipronged approach is needed to prevent CAAP. The use of newspaper articles from media archives has proven to be successful for obtaining a general perspective of CAAP, but it is limited for capturing crime incidence or for investigating CAAP spatiotemporal nature when using geographical information systems. The automated usage of digital media archives should be further explored and critically assessed in future research in criminology.

Keywords

rural crime; animal rights activists; trespassing; thefts; geographical information systems (GIS); newspaper articles

Published in

International Criminal Justice Review
2021, volume: 31, number: 4, article number: 10575677211041915

SLU Authors

• Lundqvist, Peter

  • Department of People and Society, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Law and Society

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/10575677211041915

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/115021