`Protean times?'
| Date | 01 November 2007 |
| Published date | 01 November 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895807082060 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2007 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 7(4): 347–365
DOI: 10.1177/1748895807082060
347
‘Protean times?’:
Exploring the relationships between policing,
community and ‘race’ in rural England
JON GARLAND AND NEIL CHAKRABORTI
University of Leicester, UK
Abstract
Rural villages are often portrayed as problem-free, idyllic environments
characterized by neighbourliness and cultural homogeneity. Drawing
upon the growing body of research into issues of rural racism, this
article challenges these prevailing notions by highlighting some of the
problems associated with the increasing ethnic diversity of rural
populations. The article begins by addressing the symbolic importance
given to the English countryside by many of its white inhabitants, and
assesses how this is related to romanticized feelings of national
identity, ‘localism’ and narrow invocations of village ‘communities’.
It is argued that village space is not neutral but is instead racialized
and contested, and that it is feelings of insecurity among white rural
populations, exacerbated by the presence of a markedly different
‘other’, that results in the marginalization of minority ethnic groups
from mainstream community activities. It is also suggested that these
groups are often subjected to racist victimization, which can go
unrecognized by local agencies. This clearly has implications for
policing diversity in the rural, and the article explores ways in which
the public police (and other rural agencies) could begin to develop a
more nuanced understanding of the diversification of rural space and
the ‘othering’ of outsider populations.
Key Words
community • identity • policing • racism • rurality
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Introduction
Popular constructions of rural England have perpetuated images of idyllic,
problem-free environments, which have tended to mask the exclusionary
processes that marginalize particular groups of rural ‘others’. This includes
minority ethnic ‘others’ whose experiences of racism in the English rural have
been largely overlooked by politicians, by local authorities and within crim-
inology more broadly. These idyllic [mis]conceptions of rurality, together with
the propensity for researchers to direct their attention towards environments
with larger minority ethnic communities, have left the subject of rural racism
as something of an unknown quantity, a problem whose nature, extent and
impact remains for the most part marginalized from mainstream debate.
Consequently, while the ensuing urban-centric discourse on ‘race’ issues has
led to a range of developments in the context of challenging racist prejudice,
the question of whether, and if so how, these developments can be applied to
the rural has tended to be overlooked.
While the issue of ‘race’ has been neglected somewhat in this context,
other forms of marginalization in the rural have been acknowledged more
explicitly; indeed, research conducted mainly by rural geographers and soci-
ologists into the social and spatial complexities surrounding ideas of rural
‘community’ has helped to cast doubt upon the relevance of traditional rep-
resentations of the rural, and has instead drawn attention to the extent to
which such representations have been used as exclusionary devices to decide
who does and does not belong in the English countryside (Cloke and Little,
1997). In highlighting the experiences of a range of ‘other’ rural voices, much
of this research has examined the concepts of poverty and class as definitive
features in rural imagery used to benefit disproportionately the middle-classes
at the expense and exclusion of the less affluent and mobile (see, for example,
Philo, 1992; Cloke, 1997; Murdoch and Day, 1998). This body of research
has also highlighted the way in which idyllicized constructions of the rural
are instrumental in shaping patriarchal gender relations by trivializing the
activities of women except where they are seen to relate to the provisioning
and sustenance of the male-headed household (Francis and Henderson, 1992;
Little and Austin, 1996). Similar suggestions have also been made with refer-
ence to the social positioning of gay identities in the rural, where the ‘othering’
of gay communities has been seen as integral to the maintenance of trad-
itional rural values (Kirkey and Forsyth, 2001).
During the last decade, however, the study of ‘race’ and racism within the
framework of the rural has developed significantly. Following on from Eric
Jay’s groundbreaking study of the experience of minority ethnic populations
in the west of England in the early 1990s (Jay, 1992) there has been a con-
siderable growth in the amount of empirical research conducted on related
issues in various rural areas across the UK. Most of these have been relatively
small scale, focusing upon the situation in a particular location such as north
Norfolk (Malcolm, 2000), south Wales (Robinson and Gardner, 2004) or the
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