The analysis of crime—its effects, the offences, and the offenders—to understand the interactions between crime, society, and space. In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and North America, the inner city is a crime hot spot; Canada’s Research and Statistics Division notes that ‘several indicators were found to have a significant effect on crime levels [in Saskatoon] including higher proportions of single people and youth not attending school as well as lower average household incomes’. The residential pattern of the offenders resembles the pattern of offences. See Monmonier (2006) PHG 30, specifically 375–8, on mapping crime.

Feminist geographers stress that, while most girls are brought up to fear violence by strangers in public places (thus hugely limiting female spatial mobility), most violence against women is located within the home. It’s difficult for many women to acknowledge that their homes are not a place of safety; see Meth (2003) Geoforum 34, 3. Brunel (2005) Gender Place & Cult. 12, 3 shows that organizations devoted to reducing domestic violence are still rare in urban environments and virtually non-existent in rural ones. On the perception of crime, Stenning (2005) TIBG 30, 1 addresses the ‘wider tendencies to characterize and stigmatize working-class communities’. Pain (2000) PHG 24 reviews work on fear of crime, social identity, and exclusion, and ‘local ethnographies of fear’.

Herbert and Brown (2006) Antipode 38, 4 note that the onset of neoliberalism in the United States coincided with ‘an unprecedented expansion of punishment practices that intensify social divisions rooted in class and race’. Pallot (2005) TIBG 30, 1 argues that the use of the peripheries as a place of exile and detention in the USSR was driven by the pursuit of national economic goals by a powerful central state. Post-1992, the continued expulsion of people to the peripheries may be seen as Moscow cleaning itself of ‘unwelcome elements’ at the expense of provincial Russia. S. Herbert (2006) finds that the community is ‘unbearably light’ as a basis for political action or a foil against violent crime—‘only rarely can people rally around a sense of common place’—but Martin (2003) AAAG 93, 3 is more sanguine about the role of place in motivating activism. See also Martin (2000) Geography 21, 5.