A short blog to round off the week, along the theme of interesting and emerging areas of Criminology. Have you ever been on a crime tour? There are plenty around the UK, including Criminal London and Gangster Tours.
You might already know that there is a sub-discipline of Criminology called ‘Deviant Leisure’ (see Smith and Raymen, 2018) which looks at leisure practices and harm. One area of interest is ‘Dark Tourism‘, where individuals visit sites marking tragic events in human history. Some have noted this contemporary activity overlaps with the much older practices of pilgrimage (Collins-Kreiner, 2016).
Other areas of interest in Deviant Leisure include slum tourism (listen to this BBC podcast) or voluntourism, where (usually) Westerners engage in volunteer projects in developing countries. Across all these practices, we need to ask, “Why do people engage in these activities?”, “What are the benefits and harms and, importantly, to whom?” And if we do think aspects of these practices are harmful… how ought we respond?
© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2020.
References:
Noga Collins-Kreiner, 2016. Dark tourism as/is pilgrimage. Current Issues in Tourism, 19(12) pp.1185-1189. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2015.1078299
Smith, O., and Raymen, T., 2016. Deviant Leisure: A Criminological Perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 22(1), pp.63-82. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1362480616660188
Criminology Tales 
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