Crimes Against Animal Production: Exploring the use of Media Archives

• Author: Jonatan Abraham,Vania Ceccato,Peter Lundqvist
• DOI: 10.1177/10575677211041915
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021

Crimes Against Animal

Production: Exploring the use

of Media Archives

Vania Ceccato

1

, Jonatan Abraham

1

,

and Peter Lundqvist

2

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 utilizingdata 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 tobe successful for obtaining a general

perspective of CAAP, but it is limited for capturing crime incidenceor for investigating CAAP spa-

tiotemporal 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

Introduction

“We came home after lunch and there was a sticker from the animal rights activists on our

door….lots of animals were missing. They burgled freezers and refrigerators and vandalized our

property: on windows, doors, gate, courtyard, house, bike…a symbol on the inside of the stable

door warned: ‘The Animal Liberation Front sees you’”(an animal farmer reporting a burglary on

the property in a case reported by a local Swedish newspaper in 2018).

1

Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

2

Department of People and Society, Swedish Universityof Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Vania Ceccato, Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology,

Teknikringen 10, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden.

Email: vania.ceccato@abe.kth.se

Article

International Criminal Justice Review

2021, Vol. 31(4) 384-404

© 2021 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10575677211041915

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This single example illustrates the types of threats that farmers working with animal production

are experiencing in Sweden. Official statistics of crimes against farmers are highly underreported in

Sweden (Ceccato et al. 2020) and in particular those crimes against animal production (CAAP). It is

also difficult, in most cases, to find out why the crime was committed, or to be able to associate evi-

dence with a particular individual or group, unless they leave symbols or signs (as described in the

above example) that can be linked to them. Note that these farmers and their properties are often

targets of “traditional”farm crimes as well, such as theft of livestock and other farm produce,

tools and machinery, chemicals and fertilizers as well as arson, violence, and environmental wildlife

offenses (Ceccato, 2016; Lantbrukarnas Riksförbund, 2012). Official records tend to miss the true

magnitude of crime in more remote areas because detection often depends on citizen reporting prac-

tices and, for certain crimes, on routine inspections (e.g., Barclay et al., 2001; Ceccato & Dolmen,

2011; Donnermeyer et al., 2006; Smith, 2020). When these crimes are reported in official statistics,

they are limited to a small number of cases that reach court. It is not surprising that there exists little

systematic knowledge about the nature of these threats, their frequency, or geography in Sweden.

In the search for a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind these rural crimes,

we investigate the nature of victimization carried out against farmers who are specializedin animal

production in Sweden using print and digitally accessible newspaper articles from media archives

from 2009 to 2019. This aim is achieved by:

1.Searching and analyzing print and digital newspaper archives, which we expect to provide an

insight into the specificities of CAAP in rural areas when data are unavailable.

2.Then, assessing the use of media archives as data courses to investigate the nature of victimiza-

tion carried out against farmers and in combination with analytical spatial tools, such as geo-

graphical information systems (GIS) to report the geography of these offenses at the

municipal level.

We focus on three types of farmers: mink, pig, and rabbits because they compose the majority of

articles found in the media archives between 2009 and 2019. The article is structured as follows.

Section “Theoretical Background: The Potential of media Archives and CAAP”establishes the the-

oretical framework for the study. Then, section “The Study Case”introduces Sweden as the study

area, the data and methodology followed by results in the “Results”section, which are discussed

in the “Discussion of the Results”section. Finally, before we conclude the article, we discuss pos-

sible responses for the mitigation of CAAP in rural Sweden followed by research recommendations

in the “Conclusions and Recommendations”section.

Theoretical Background: The Potential of Media Archives and CAAP

The evolving literature in the last few decades has started documenting crimes against farms, but

these studies have typically focused on property crimes against farmers, tractors, crops, or other

produce. The literature has explored the farmers’victimization using a variety of sources, from offi-

cial statistics, surveys, and media archives, from burglaries to fraud to environmental crimes, but the

knowledge is limited regarding CAAP and we therefore suggest media archives as a potential source

of information about the nature of CAAP when traditional official statistics are lacking or underre-

present a phenomenon.

CAAP and MediaArchives

The potential of using media archives as a reference for crimes that suffer from high underreport-

ing rates is not new in the international literature, as the media coverage can reflect public discourse

Ceccato et al.385