Within academic and political debates, rural crime is often understood to be a marginal issue. Those involved in rural offences are perceived as low-level offenders who engage in opportunistic crimes which do not pose significant risks for those affected. The current paper challenges these perceptions by presenting the findings of a national study carried out on behalf of the National Rural Crime Network. The findings for the project evidence the well-established links between the UK’s rural crime problem and wider forms of serious and organised crime, including transnational organised crime networks. Data from the study will be used to sketch the nature of these links and to raise questions around the efficacy of current policing models in responding to these issues.

Frauds - whether elite, blue collar or 'organised crime' - have become a major growth point around the world, mostly in terms of the 'democratisation' in the number and demographics of victims, but also because of the globalisation of offenders who are able to commit harms from afar. What is to be done to reduce those harms, and to reduce harms to which sorts of victims in particular? ‘Technology’ and public-private cooperation is the normal ‘solution’ proposed, but is this top-down approach either feasible or likely to succeed, given problems of translating warnings into action?

In England and Wales, notwithstanding the fairly high probability that people will become victims of fraud – around 1 in 12 to 1 in 18 people annually (plus computer misuse like hacking offences) - in the context of other demands on policing, fraud still occupies a subsidiary spot in the minds of the public as well as in the minds (and effective caseload) of the police. The key concerns about maintaining the current status quo are: declining public confidence in the police; gaps in service for the majority of victims, including those who want/need a service and the socially flexible construct of ‘vulnerable’ people – plus information (as well as resource) gaps in the challenges of identifying and intervening against repeat victimisation; practical barriers to resourcing and implementing greater responses from within the criminal justice system; and challenges of addressing fraud at a local and regional level, irrespective of broader changes at the national level, whether to private (including tech firms and financial services), public or third sectors.
Other initiatives might include links to local services, and the need for targeted prevention which can be more readily done by local organisations who can adapt to local problems and local demographics: this requires new ways of approaching fraud. This might dovetail with national-, sector or industry-led initiatives (including AI-assisted police advice to victims), but could be partly independent of them. To do so would require developing or adapting an appropriate framework for such initiatives, and we draw here upon the public health framework as a distributed approach to harm reduction for a range of potential victims, some of whom have cognitive impairment. Consideration is also given to the feasibility of such frameworks in other countries of the Global North and South.

Chinese organised drug-related crimes have received limited scholarly attention. To address this gap, this study endeavours to comprehensively map the organised drug trafficking network within China and elucidate the mechanisms behind the formation of trafficking routes across 41 major Chinese cities from 2012 to 2022. Through analysis of court records, the research generates a drug trafficking map using a network approach. The findings reveal distinct patterns of drug flow among the cities, highlighting a clear division of roles as origin, transit, and destination points within the network. Furthermore, the study identifies significant changes in the network's structure over the past decade. To deepen our understanding of the mechanisms driving route formation, this research incorporates Peter Reuter’s hypotheses on drug trafficking route generation by applying Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) for analysis.

Several studies and non-academic reports suggest that the UK remains a hot spot for investments of Italian and Russian organised crime groups in the real estate sector with high concentration in the London metropolitan area. Italian and Russian criminal organisations have notable tendencies to be highly flexible, structurally organised and pose a serious threat to the economic and financial systems in all European countries, including the UK real estate market. Despite the attention that the relationships between investments, real estate and Italian and Russian organised crime in the UK have generated over the years, however the literature suffers from a paucity of studies and limited data focused on this topic. Henceforth, this study is relevant within criminological and legal scholarship as it addresses the existing gap in the literature in terms of the infiltration of organised crime in this legitimate sector. The research adopts an entrepreneurial approach (Passas, 1999) in order to investigate Italian and Russian organised crime mobility abroad and their infiltration in the UK real estate sector. By using an interpretivist approach, the semi-structured interviews conducted with different practitioners and academics in the UK and Italy have generated some interesting findings in terms of Italian and Russian organised crime’s migration process abroad, their modus operandi and the formation of criminal opportunities in the UK real estate sector generated through legislative and socio-economic discrepancies within this specific socio-economic context. Lastly, this academic investigation broadens our understanding of money laundering schemes and crime facilitators leading to theory building in this area.

Italy’s pioneering anti-mafia legislation allows assets confiscated from mafiosi to be handed over to civil society groups. This so-called ‘social reuse’ of assets is gaining ground in academic and institutional circles globally. The basic concept – that of reusing the proceeds of crime for the benefit of communities – is compelling, attracting scholars from economics, criminology, law, and the humanities, and featuring in EU Directive 2014/42/EU. Lawmakers and academics have lauded the ‘symbolic’ benefits of this approach; however, such benefits remain ill-defined, and difficult to measure. Furthermore, no research has yet explored the potential ‘symbolic’ implications when social reuse projects fail.

This paper examines two case studies of the social reuse of confiscated real estate in the Italian region of Calabria. In both cases, the allocation of properties to third sector organisations ultimately resulted in failure, with significant negative repercussions. Drawing on methods from the author’s background in the humanities, the paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, conducting a critical discourse analysis of media, institutional, and judicial sources. The paper has two aims: first, to interrogate the ‘symbolic’ goals of legislation facilitating the social reuse of assets, and second, to propose a tentative novel framework to assess the symbolic impact of social reuse legislation in mafia-affected territory.

The paper argues that research in this area is particularly timely and urgent in the context of a growing number of high-profile fraud cases connected to third sector social reuse in Italy, and the global turn toward social reuse. It further argues that criminology has a key role to play in the interdisciplinary debates surrounding social reuse in general.