Charting the place of islands in criminology: On isolation, integration and insularity
| Author | Zoe Staines,John Scott |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620910250 |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620910250
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620910250
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Charting the place of islands
in criminology: On isolation,
integration and insularity
John Scott
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Zoe Staines
University of Queensland, Australia
Abstract
In this article, we seek to chart the place of islands in criminology with respect to
both their place- and space-based attributes. We explore the possibilities of island
criminology through the case of Pitcairn Island, which in 2004 formed the backdrop for
a series of sensational sexual assault trials. The trials thrust the Island, its people, history
and customs into the international spotlight, acting as a counter-narrative to the popular
mythology of islands as idyllic paradises. This case study provides us with an opportunity
to re-examine how fundamental concepts for understanding crime and regulation, such
as social integration, community and belonging, and exclusion are practised in the often
closed and bounded networks of island ecologies.
Keywords
community, rural and remote, social capital, social ecology, violence
Introduction
In 2002 Janelle Patton was murdered on the Australian territory Norfolk Island. Her body
had 64 stab wounds, a fractured skull, broken pelvis and broken ankle. In 2006, Glenn
Peter Charles McNeill, a 28-year-old New Zealander, was charged with her murder and
Corresponding author:
John Scott, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George Street, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia.
Email: j31.scott@qut.edu.au
910250TCR0010.1177/1362480620910250Theoretical CriminologyScott and Staines
research-article2020
Article
2021, Vol. 25(4) 578–600
in 2007 sentenced to 24 years in prison. The murder generated headlines in Australia and
New Zealand, not least because Patton had been the first person murdered on Norfolk
Island in 152 years. The murder also jarred with the idea of the Island as a secluded arca-
dia from which to escape social problems associated with mainland/urban life (e.g.
Christian-Bailey, 2006; Clarke, 1966). Norfolk Island is indeed isolated, laying 877
miles east of the Australian Mainland. At the time of the 2016 Australian census, it had
1748 inhabitants living in an area of 38.7 km2 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).
The isolation that now makes it an ideal tourist destination had also historically rendered
it a brutal site of transportation for convicts from mainland Australia who had trans-
gressed during their sentence.1
Media reports were attracted not only to the gruesome nature of the crime, but also
made much of the perceived tight-knit nature of the community and the Island’s earlier
violent history (Maynard, 2011). Many of those now living on Norfolk are descendants
of Bounty mutineers who moved there in 1856 from Pitcairn Island (also in the Pacific
Ocean) and are closely connected by kinship (Christian-Bailey, 2006). Now one or more
among them might be a murderer. The situation was reminiscent of an Agatha Christie
who-done-it, ripe for amateur sleuthing, and turned a spotlight away from the scenic
beauty of the Island and onto its inhabitants. The murder had again transformed the ter-
ritory into a site of grim consumption, the Island and islanders’ strangeness amplified
amid the talk of murder.
From a criminological point of view, the reaction to the case was interesting to the
extent that place was instrumental to the narratives constructed around the crime. The
isolation of the Island became a signifier for backwardness, rather than beauty (e.g.
Latham, 2006; Macklin, 2013). Further, social integration, often uncritically deemed a
positive attribute in criminology when cast as social capital, was transformed in the
popular consciousness into a criminogenic attribute which might produce violence. None
of this would have been unfamiliar to rural or green criminologists, who have long been
sensitive to discursive constructions of place (see Jewkes and Moran, 2015; McClanahan,
2019; Scott and Hogg, 2015; South, 2019). But what is surprising is that criminology is
yet to examine islands as specific ecological settings, accounting for place (the social
construction of crime in such settings) and space (the objective social and geographic
conditions of islands and island life that have criminogenic impacts). The reasons for this
neglect require careful consideration, the type that cannot be provided here, but an obvi-
ous factor is criminology’s obsession with urban crime. Perhaps less apparent has been
the marginalization of islands in the global North as places on the geographic and cul-
tural peripheries.2 They are Other places, national backwaters or places to be colonized
and, more recently, consumed as tourist sites.
Too often, criminological theories are developed through testing in one environment,
typically urban. In this article, we seek to chart the place of islands in criminology with
respect to both their place- and space-based attributes. Although they are situated in
criminological backwaters, as Hay (2006: 19–20) observes, there are sound reasons to
take an interest in islands. Ten per cent of the world’s population lives on islands and
nearly a quarter of all sovereign states are islands. Islands have also taken a lead in the
development of innovative forms of governance with regard to environmental manage-
ment and the development of alternative technologies, and they have been fundamental
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Scott and Staines
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