A comprehensive approach to classifying acts of crime and violence at tourism destinations.(Special Issue on War, Terrorism, Tourism: Times of Crisis and Recovery)

Every minute of every day a crime or a violent act occurs at a tourist destination somewhere in the world. For the purpose of this study I define crime as "an act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it" (Black 1979, p. 334) and violence as "an unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with the accompaniment of vehemence, outrage or fury" (Black 1979, p. 1408). I intentionally distinguish between the two concepts, although in many cases, acts of violence are considered crimes, such as assault, battery, rape, murder, and so on. In other cases, however, such acts of violence as international wars, civil wars, coups, riots, political protests, and terrorism are considered by some as criminal acts but by others as "glorified acts of struggle for freedom or liberation."

While some acts of crime and violence are aimed directly at tourists, such as shooting a tourist driving a rental car in Florida or robbing a tourist train in Mexico, others are committed against local residents, political figures, businesspeople, and famous personalities who have nothing to do with the tourism industry. Furthermore, while some of the motives for such acts are economic or social - such as theft, robbery, and murder - others, such as terrorist attacks, riots, and international wars, are political. But as recent history has proven, no matter who the victim is and what the motives of the perpetrators are, when such acts result in bodily harm or loss of life and occur at a relatively high frequency, the image of the destination will be affected and tourist arrivals will decline. Even long before crimes against tourists were highly publicized by the international press, cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans earned the reputation of being unsafe even for their own residents, and many tourists refused to visit them. The same can be said about political and civil violence. Acts such as the Gulf War, the breakup of the Yugoslavia War, the uprising in Chiapas (Mexico), the partition of Cyprus, the Basque terrorist attacks, the Beijing Tiananmen square incident, the Los Angeles riots, to name just a few, although not aimed at tourists or the tourism industry, caused serious declines in tourist arrivals and in some cases totally decimated the tourism industry (Bar-On 1996; Gartner and Shen 1992; Hall and O'Sullivan 1996; Mansfeld and Kliot 1996; Pitts 1996; Pizam and Mansfeld 1996a; Richter and Waugh 1986; Ryan 1993; Shiebler, Crotts, and Hollinger 1996).

By now it is evident that most acts of crime or violence that occur at tourism destinations will have some effects on tourism demand. The question that needs to be answered is which acts will have what effect and what methods are currently available for prevention and recovery.

OBJECTIVES

The overall objective of this study was to create a comprehensive theoretical approach that will enable researchers and practitioners to examine the effects of all acts of crime and violence at tourist destinations and suggest methods of prevention and recovery. Specifically we set out to

1. classify the attributes of acts of crime and violence,

2. analyze the differential effects that such attributes have on tourism demand,

3. examine the effectiveness of methods used for prevention and recovery from such acts, and

4. identify the parties responsible for prevention and recovery.

METHOD

A typology was created on the basis of an extensive literature review of criminal/violent incidents at tourist destinations. The review was conducted via examination of case studies reported in English-language newspapers, weekly magazines, and professional tourism periodicals in a period of 10 years. This review resulted in more than 300 such incidences that occurred at major tourist destinations around the world.

The typology identified

* five attributes of the criminal/violent act, namely, motive, victim, location, severity, and frequency;

* three attributes of the effect, namely, magnitude, expanse, and duration;

* methods for prevention;

* parties responsible for prevention;

* methods for recovery; and

* parties responsible for recovery.

The interaction between motives (4 categories), victims (5 categories), location (2 categories), severity (4 categories), and frequency (4 categories) resulted in a total of 640 types of criminal/violent acts. These ideal types were then inserted into a matrix to examine their effects on tourism demand. Regretfully, the literature review neither provided us with a sufficient number of cases to cover all 640 ideal types nor gave us a clear indication of the differential effects of each type of act on tourism demand. To overcome this obstacle, a series of interviews were conducted with law enforcement officials, tourism security and safety personnel, and marketing professionals in tourism enterprises. The objective of these interviews was to fill in the literature review gaps regarding

1. the differential effects that criminal/violent acts have on tourism destinations,

2. the evaluation of the effectiveness of various methods of prevention and recovery from such incidences, and

3. the identification of the parties responsible for prevention …