Access to Justice for Rural Victims

This chapter discusses the concept of 'access to justice' with regards to rural victims of crime and argues that it may be the most important issue for theory and research in rural criminology over the coming decades. It begins by clarifying definitions of rural, victimisation, crime, harm, access and justice. Through various examples, it illustrates what access to justice means. Working from the concept of deservingness, it identifies two fundamental types of access to justice within which various examples can be categorised. The first access to justice issue is the lack of credibility and importance of rural peoples and rural communities; that is, the idea that police and other criminal justice services are less likely to be made available. Examples can range from the lack of police response to rural people as witnesses and victims to the uneven distribution of resources in favour of urban residents and policy-making related to safety and security that often ignores the rural. The second type is too much credibility, but this time as possible offenders/criminals, resulting in discriminatory enforcement by law enforcement and other inequities in the criminal justice system, as illustrated by the collective experiences of Indigenous peoples in settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.