The ecology of outdoor rape: The case of Stockholm, Sweden
| Author | Vania Ceccato,Guangquan Li,Robert Haining |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370818770842 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370818770842
European Journal of Criminology
2019, Vol. 16(2) 210 –236
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370818770842
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The ecology of outdoor rape:
The case of Stockholm,
Sweden
Vania Ceccato
Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Guangquan Li
Northumbria University, UK
Robert Haining
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
The objective of this article is to report the results of an ecological study into the geography
of rape in Stockholm, Sweden, using small area data. In order to test the importance of factors
indicating opportunity, accessibility and anonymity to the understanding of the geography of rape,
a two-stage modelling approach is implemented. First, the overall risk factors associated with
the occurrence of rape are identified using a standard Poisson regression, then a local analysis
using profile regression is performed. Findings from the whole-map analysis show that accessibility,
opportunity and anonymity are all, to different degrees, important in explaining the overall
geography of rape - examples of these risk factors are the presence of subway stations or whether
a basområde is close to the city centre. The local analysis reveals two groupings of high risk of
rape areas associated with a variety of risk factors: city centre areas with a concentration of alcohol
outlets, high residential population turnover and high counts of robbery; and poor suburban areas
with schools and large female residential populations where subway stations are located and where
people express a high fear of crime. The article concludes by reflecting upon the importance of
these results for future research as well as indicating the implications of these results for policy.
Keywords
Geographical Information Systems (GIS), profile regression, public places, rape, sexual violence
Corresponding author:
Vania Ceccato, Royal Institute of Technology, Drottning Kristinas väg 30, Stockholm, 10044, Sweden.
Email: vania.ceccato@abe.kth.se
770842EUC0010.1177/1477370818770842European Journal of CriminologyCeccato et al.
research-article2018
Article
Ceccato et al. 211
Introduction
In 2013, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported the case of a young woman
raped in one of the most popular public gardens in the centre of Stockholm. In 2016,
another young woman was sexually attacked, but in that incident the assault happened on
the city’s outskirts (Dagens Nyheter, 2013, 2016). About two-thirds of rape cases reported
to the police in Sweden happen indoors, committed by someone the woman knows; only
about 30 percent take place outdoors, in public places. But outdoor rape is a distinctive
form of this crime. First, in the case of outdoor rape, the rapist is usually someone
unknown to the woman. Second, this type of sexual violence often takes place in inter-
stitial public spaces such as back streets and hidden places and its occurrence depends,
in part at least, on local environmental circumstances (Ceccato, 2014, and Ceccato et al.,
2017). Third, outdoor rape has an impact on the community and may affect local levels
of fear of crime. Fourth, unlike domestic rape, improvements in city planning and
changes in policing methods might prevent, or at least greatly reduce, the numbers of
cases of outdoor rape.
What characterizes the environments where rape takes place? Might a better under-
standing of the kinds of places where rape occurs be helpful in preventing it? We argue
that place matters for our understanding of where the crime of rape happens in two
senses. First, place matters in the sense of a specific, highly localized, micro-scale setting
such as the existence of a secluded area in a park or badly lit alleyway where the criminal
act takes place. Second, place matters in the sense of a more broadly defined meso-scale
environment or geographical context such as a neighbourhood or small area of a town or
city within which the crime is situated. In the past, where an attack happened was
regarded as a marginal aspect of the rape act (see, for example, Belknap, 1987), but more
recent work has shown evidence of the importance of these settings (for a review, see
Beauregard et al., 2005, and Hewitt and Beauregard, 2014).
This article reports the results of modelling police-recorded rape cases in Stockholm,
Sweden, by small areas (basområdes), complementing earlier work that focused on the
micro-places where individual rape incidents took place (Ceccato, 2014). These small
areas have, on average, a population of 2200 individuals. In focusing on what we will
term the meso-scale of analysis, the purpose is to emphasize the ecological characteris-
tics of places, their land use, demographic composition and socio-economic characteris-
tics, and their association with varying numbers of cases. Ecological models assess the
statistical significance and substantive importance of different small area characteristics
to our understanding of the geography of crime. However, in undertaking analysis at this
scale and particularly with a predatory crime such as rape that involves very direct and
immediate contact between offender and target, it is also necessary to recognize that
small area (meso-scale) counts will be influenced by how many suitable ‘micro-scale
spaces’ exist within each area. These are areas offering adequate opportunity as well as
anonymity to the attacker. This presents a challenge for ecological modelling but one that
is not unique to the study of the crime of rape (see, for example, Sherman et al., 2006,
and Weisburd et al., 2012).
Data analysis involves two phases of modelling (Li et al., n.d.). First, a hierarchical
regression model is fitted, the estimates from which show how each risk factor modifies
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