The Problem of Pleasure

Leisure, Tourism and Crime

Carol Jones, Elaine Barclay, Rob Mawby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415672368
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136598692
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The tourism and leisure industries are big business. Opportunities for leisure and tourism have escalated as disposable income, technology, travel and education have become increasingly available in recent times. However, this trend has been juxtaposed with an increase in crime, particularly since the early the 1950s. Acquisitive crimes have been facilitated with the development of more portable and valuable commodities; some activities, such as drink driving and disorder, have now been socially defined as crimes and are more readily identified through new technology such as the increasing use of CCTV.

The Problem of Pleasure covers them all. The purpose of this book is to inform and enlighten a range of readers, whose interests may be academic or commercial on possible crime events and modus operandi of criminals. The book has a global perspective, bringing together leading academics from the UK, the US, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand who examine several aspects of leisure that are vulnerable to crime, from illegal hunting to street racing, as well as the impact of crime upon tourists and the tourism industry.

This book will be a key text for students of tourism and leisure as well as criminology and sociology; people working in the tourism and recreation industry; policy makers and the police.

1  Introduction

The problem of pleasure: theoretical
foundations

R. I. Mawby

With chapters featuring the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Ghana and South Africa, it would be easy to assume that the study of crime, leisure and tourism is both well established and coherent. Such a view would be misleading. Although all the authors here are well-established experts in their own fields, few would associate themselves with ‘leisure, tourism and crime’ as a specialism. Whether sociologists, criminologists or tourism academics, probably none of the authors would claim that their academic discipline had a holistic take on the subjects covered herein. Indeed, it is noticeable that, whereas sociologists and criminologists have addressed different dimensions of leisure and deviance/ crime, few have expressed an interest in tourism and crime. Also, although tourism specialists have embraced crime as a specialism within their discipline, the focus has largely been on tourists and tourist centres as highrisk locations, with less emphasis on the problems caused by tourists, and even less on the relationship between everyday routine (leisure) activities and behaviour when on holiday.

For this reason, this text readily subdivides into two. In the first section, we consider crime, deviance and leisure, what might be termed impermissible or contested pleasures. In the second, we turn to address the relationship between tourism, and the ‘pains of pleasure’.

Impermissible or contested pleasures

The following six chapters address the ambiguous relationship between leisure and crime. Again, these may be subdivided into two groups: those that address seemingly passive leisure activities (reading, watching television, computer games, cinema going) and those that concern more active leisure pursuits.

The relationship between crime and the media has an academic pedigree stretching back to labelling theorists in the 1960s who were concerned at the ways in which, inter alia, the behaviour of working-class youths was redefined as troublesome and amplified into a social problem (Cohen 1972; Cohen and Young 1973). However, research findings have been littered with contradictions and ambiguities (Jewkes 2004; Leishman and Mason 2003; Reiner 2007). For example, content analysis of both press and TV/film representations of crime suggest that the crimes of the rich, famous and powerful are at least as likely to be the subject of both news reporting and crime fiction. Moreover, the extent to which readers and viewers are influenced into offending as a result of what they read or see is problematic (Reiner 2007), both because of the multitude of other influential factors and because these are passive leisure pursuits that, at least temporarily, keep potential offenders (and, incidentally, potential victims) off the streets.

The two chapters included in this volume consequently reflect a more modest approach to entertainment on the big and small screens. As Jane Monckton Smith notes in Chapter 2, consumption of movies is a key form of leisure-time activity for many people. Focusing on the paradox that the slasher/serial killer film, which is principally dedicated to the violation and abuse of women, is regularly enjoyed by women (Harper 2004), Monckton Smith interviewed teenage female consumers of slasher films. She argues that these young women ‘negotiate meaning to their own advantage’. Watching such films was thus a confirmation that their own personal everyday fears were shared by others and were consequently ‘normal’, and a way of confronting fear in a controlled and supportive way. Nevertheless, consumption of these films has pernicious effects: the female consumer is facing a real-life threat which is being vividly reinforced. In Chapter 3, Jenny Wise and Alyce McGovern shift the emphasis to police procedures and the investigative process on the small screen. They use their own primary research in Australia and secondary sources from North America and the UK to assess the impact of TV police dramas and ‘fly-on-the-wall’-style programmes, arguing that the media have a significant influence on community perceptions about the police and the criminal investigative process. Indeed, it is arguable that ‘cop shows’ and crime scene shows are changing the practices of a range of key players, including offenders, victims, police officers, scene of crime officers and the jury. Some of these themes, interestingly, reemerge in Part II in the context of how media images of tourist resorts influence holiday-makers’ decisions.

Whether or not passive leisure pursuits such as watching films, or indeed their more interactive cousins the computer-generated games, provoke or inspire deviant leisure activities is questionable. However, the remaining four chapters in Part I focus on crime and disorder on the streets rather than cocooned within the cinema ‘suites’. In this sense, the deviant leisure pursuits of – particularly – young, working-class males are a core feature of sociological and criminological works stretching back to the Chicago school. Even there, though, the research reflected two complementary perspectives that remain evident today: crime as a reaction to the pressures of growing up in the inner city, later resurrected as strain theory (Agnew 1992); and crime as fun, currently identified with cultural criminology (Presdee 2000). The first of these, fundamental to the zonal theory of urban growth (Shaw and McKay 1969) and epitomized in Merton’s (1938) theory of anomie, was translated into the lived reality of inner-city youths through Cloward and Ohlin’s (1960) Delinquency and Opportunity and, in Britain, downes’s (1966) The Delinquent Solution. Confronted by structural impediments to achieving the American dream, working-class youths were seen to adjust by adopting illegal means to economic success, through property crimes. Whereas Cloward and Ohlin suggested that those who failed might also drop out and adopt deviant leisure pursuits, such as drug use, downes moved anomie theory further into the leisure context by arguing that inner-city youths adopted deviant leisure alternatives when they failed to achieve the leisure-dominated lifestyle portrayed by the media, a point reaffirmed in Cohen’s (1972) interpretation of the violent confrontations between Mods and Rockers in British tourist resorts in the 1960s.

Although in no way contradicting this perspective, crime as fun puts the emphasis firmly upon the positive aspects of deviance. It also traces its roots to the Chicago school, where William Whyte’s (1964) Street Corner Society portrayed youths as embracing the limited opportunities for ‘action’ in their environment, rather than reacting against failure to achieve societal goals. Cultural criminology embraces this tradition in arguing that youths turn to crime and deviance for the adrenaline and thrills that they get through committing illegal acts such as joy-riding, graffiti artwork, and antisocial behaviour, the thrills that come from what Lyng (1990) calls ‘edgework’, and then addresses the processes whereby cultural forms and cultural expressions themselves become criminalized (Ferrell 1999; Presdee 2000).

Chapters by Rob White, Zannagh Hatton, and Karenza Moore and Fiona Measham essentially draw on these traditions. In Chapter 4, White considers the ‘making, taking and shaping of public spaces’. Although based in Australia, his review provides a general overview of leisure ‘on the edge’, where deviance offers an alternative to the banal routines of conventional life: where street cultural manifestations such as vandalism, skateboarding, drugs, cruising and peer-group violence provide avenues of expression when other leisure options and facilities are inaccessible, and a means of establishing status through leisure where high rates of unemployment make status through work unobtainable. Nevertheless, as White acknowledges, such group activities may include collective behaviour that is highly threatening and dangerous, leading to moral panics and legislative response. Following Cohen (1972), White argues that many of these groups and their activities may be ostracized and penalized on the basis of their perceived immoral and threatening behaviour and presence.

Hatton’s research in the southwest of England focuses on one example of street culture, centred around cars and boy racers. Hatton echoes White in stressing the symbolic importance of the car for young males, whereby ‘their cars provide a medium through which they are able to convey a sense of self, of who they are, or who they wish others to believe them to be.’ Being involved in the modification and racing of powerful cars is used to confer macho masculinity, something which may have been previously blocked by age, a low economic position or social and spatial isolation.

In Chapter 6, Moore and Measham address more of the ‘impermissible pleasures’ discussed by White, namely ‘immoderate’ alcohol consumption and illicit drug use, a subject that has featured regularly in the British (and Australian) press in terms of public disorder and the nighttime economy (NTE) (Hayward and Hobbs 2007). Following Measham (2004a), this analysis is also heavily embedded within cultural criminology. The emphasis here, as with White and Hatton, is on youths’ behaviour, rather than its impact on the wider community, and indeed they argue that such pleasures ‘are ambiguous in terms of the production of harm, the impact on communities and the wider social fabric’. Consequently, they reject a discourse based around drug use as harmful (to both users and society) in favour of one focused on the attractions of ‘immoderate consumption’ and its minimal consequences for wider society, leading them to question how and why wider social and cultural practices influence whether leisure activities are placed within or outside the realms of acceptability.

This question resonates through Chapter 7, where Elaine Barclay and Joe Donnermeyer review their research on hunting as a popular, if not always legitimate, leisure activity in Australia. Of course hunting, also known as poaching or wildlife offences (Lemieux 2011; Wyatt 2009), may be finance driven rather than a leisure pursuit. Conversely, hunting in Australia bears little similarity to the contested nature of the hunting debate in the UK (Woods 2011). At first sight, Barclay and donnermeyer’s topic also bears little similarity to the preceding three chapters. However, it too covers leisure pursued in public and private space, drawing a distinction between that considered legitimate by landowners and that perceived to be a problem, raising questions about the competing interests of conservation, agriculture and mining as well as leisure and tourism, which are addressed in different contexts in the following section.

Tourism and the ‘pains of pleasure’

In contrast to the work on leisure and crime, the research on tourism, crime and disorder has been carried out largely by tourism academics. It has also focused more on local people and them (and tourists) as victims rather than on those responsible for crime in resorts. As a result, there is an established body of research that demonstrates a close association between tourism and crime (Brunt and Hambly 1999; Pizam and Mansfeld 1996; Ryan 1993a). Many tourist areas experience relatively high levels of crime and disorder. Within such areas the routine activities of tourists and seasonal workers may lead to them committing crimes (Bellis et al. 2000; Prideaux 1996), tourists and local people becoming the victims of crime (Mawby et al. 2010) or both. Equally, residents of many tourist areas express concern at the ‘pains of pleasure’. A wide range of studies demonstrates that, irrespective of actual changes in levels of crime, local residents feel that tourism generates more crime (davis et al. 1988; Haralambopoulos and Pizam 1996; Ross 1992). Of course, not all tourist areas are associated with high levels of crime and disorder. The nature of the tourist area has a direct impact upon crime rates and patterns, with those mass tourism resorts marketed at younger tourists evidencing the greatest public disorder problems. Equally, not all tourists experience the same risk or express concerns.

Unlike tourism researchers, for whom crime and deviance appear to hold considerable attraction, criminologists have, with a few notable exceptions, avoided discussions of tourism as a crime generator. Even studies of antisocial behaviour have tended to focus on the NTE of larger cities and ignore tourists as offenders and tourist resorts as crime and disorder hot spots. This is well illustrated in Rob Mawby’s chapter on public disorder, antisocial behaviour and alcohol-related crime in tourist resorts, which offers almost a reverse image of Moore and Measham’s chapter. Although with few exceptions (Homel et al. 1997) research on alcohol-related disorder has been sited in the metropolis, this problem also confronts many tourist resorts, especially those marketed to young, single tourists. Situating research in southwest England in the context of Australian, dutch, Greek and English examples, Mawby considers how and why this market is created, its implications for local residents and the difficulty of changing a resort’s image.

This focus on the imagery promoted by the tourism industries is taken further in Chapter 9, where Ross Wolf and Hugh Potter contrast two very different US holiday destinations, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Orlando in Florida. Las Vegas is generally known and marketed as a destination for leisure activities aimed at the adult market, a city where gambling, alcohol and sex are central tourist attractions. Orlando, in contrast, is marketed as a family-oriented leisure destination. Wolf and Potter compare the ways in which tourist-oriented policing, criminal law and zoning policies apply in the two areas. However, whereas the overall picture is one of contrasting tourist areas that are policed very differently, a comparison of police crime statistics reveals surprisingly few significant differences.

In Chapter 10, John Buttle and James Rodgers consider imagery in terms of the way crime and insecurity are presented in the media, and speculate on the impact signal crimes (Innes 2004a) have on tourists’ perceptions of safety. Unlike most earlier research, which has targeted densely populated sites of mass tourism, they address safety in New Zealand, where tourism promotion of the rural idyll is confronted by press emphasis on sexual and violent crimes, and – as in Australia (Peel and Steen 2007) – media depictions of tourists at risk have proved controversial.

As Richard George also acknowledges in Chapter 11, the image that a resort has vis-à-vis its perceived safety is important, since tourists are deterred from visiting unsafe resorts (Brayshaw 1995; Schiebler et al. 1996). South Africa is a case in point (George 2001, 2003). Whereas Cape Town is commonly perceived as unsafe, George’s chapter focuses upon Table Mountain National Park (TMNP), an urban park on the fringe of the Cape Town metropolis. His findings on concern over safety in both TMNP and Cape Town itself are mixed. However, following Mawby, Brunt and Hambly (2000) and George (2003), even those who perceived TMNP to be unsafe were willing to revisit and recommend the attraction. This was particularly the case for domestic – as opposed to international – visitors, who were both more aware of safety problems and less likely to be affected by them, possibly thanks to their tolerance of higher crime rates in South Africa.

Rural tourism is also a theme in Elaine Barclay and Rob Mawby’s chapter on caravan parks in Australia. Partly on account of their rural location and partly, perhaps, owing to the possibility of parks acting like gated communities (Low 2004), park users in general neither perceived crime and disorder to be particular problems nor suffered much crime. However, there were marked differences both between and within different sites, and Barclay and Mawby explain these in terms of guardianship, accessibility and rewards.

In contrast, in Chapter 13 Kwaku Boakye describes the situation in Ghana, where a country dependent upon tourism is bedevilled by crime against international tourists. Although a third of the tourists who were contacted had experienced crime or threatening situations, Boakye suggests, echoing George, that tourists were not deterred from revisiting the country. Following Barclay and Mawby, he also notes differences within his samples, with variations in feeling of safety and experiences of different offence types according to area and the characteristics of the tourists concerned.

Boakye’s chapter ends with a review of the response of the Ghanaian police, a topic extended in Carol Jones’s concluding chapter. Given the extent of crime against tourists and the distinctive ways in which tourists are affected, Jones looks at the way the police and victim assistance programmes respond to tourism issues, and details dedicated services for tourists in general and tourist victims in particular. Comparing the UK, the Irish Republic and the USA, she looks at the situation in Cornwall, where no specialist services are offered, Florida, where specialist Tourist Police operate, and dublin, with its Tourist Victim Support service.

Part I clearly focuses on crime, deviance and leisure, with the emphasis on leisure as allegedly problem-generating, albeit many of the contributors reject this perception. From a policy perspective, the emphasis has correspondingly been on policing leisure and especially the NTE. In contrast, Part II, in addressing the relationship between tourism and the ‘pains of pleasure’, focuses more on tourists and host communities as problem receptors. Consequently, policies address victim services and tourist-related policing as both controlling leisure and providing support to tourists. The distinction is never clear-cut. However, it epitomizes the extent to which a review of leisure, tourism and crime draws together scholarship across a range of disciplines.

This selection of readings on leisure, tourism and crime is, consequently, important for at least two reasons. First, it offers theoretical relevance in adding to criminologists’ understanding of the relationship between lifestyle (of leisure-seekers, tourists and local residents) and risk. Second, it has a practical importance in helping to inform the tourist industry of the contested issues surrounding leisure and tourism, and therefore in aiding in the adoption of crime and disorder reduction initiatives that meet the needs of locals and tourists alike.

Part I

2 The paradox of cinematic
sexualized violence as
entertainment

Jane Monckton Smith

Introduction

Sexual violence is considered one of the most serious of crimes in our society and its potential to cause significant and long-lasting trauma to victims is acknowledged. However, it is also a central theme in various forms of leisure activity from art, exhibitions, theatre, magazines, music video, concerts, literature and true crime books to guided tours and theme park rides. It is also the subject of a highly successful genre in film making – the horror/slasher film – which almost exclusively focuses on the ‘serial killer’. The Saw franchise, for example, is a series of films described in some film reviews as ‘torture porn’ and has produced at least three number ones at the box office, with Saw V grossing $113 million worldwide (Box Office Mojo 2009), making it the highest-grossing horror franchise in history (Snider 2008). With its own dedicated and named ride and maze at Thorpe Park, an amusement theme park in London, UK, the commodification of sexualized violence is clearly popular and profitable.

This chapter considers what is often popularly represented as a paradox: female consumption and enjoyment of the slasher/horror film, which is princip...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributor biographies
• 1 Introduction The problem of pleasure: theoretical foundations
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography
• Index