Robbed: a serial autoethnography of a tourism researcher as a robbery victim

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to ameliorate the current imbalance in the study of tourist-oriented crime, between the predominant macro-level quantitative studies and the relatively scarce micro-level qualitative studies. I deploy a variant of the autoethnographic method to gain insight on aspects of crime against tourists which are not generally noticed in the literature, owing to the difficulty of directly accessing either the perpetrators or the victims of particular tourist-oriented crimes. By a detailed description of four cases of robbery/theft which I have experienced in the course of my own travels, I point to several significant but under-researched micro-level issues, such as, on the one hand, the conduct of the perpetrators and their techniques in committing the crime, and on the other, the tourist-victims’ experience and reaction to the crime, their quest for assistance, and the crime’s consequences for them. The article concludes by pointing to the absence of supportive frameworks for tourist-crime victims in host countries, which leaves them on their own to deal with the impacts and consequences of the crime.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourist-oriented crime
• robbery
• theft
• tourist behavior
• hotspots

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Erik Cohen is the George S. Wise Professor of Sociology (emeritus) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught between 1959 and 2000. He has conducted research in Israel, Peru, the Pacific Islands and, since 1977, in Thailand. He is the author of more than two hundred publications and of several books, including Contemporary tourism: Diversity and change (Elsevier, 2004), and Explorations in Thai tourism (Emerald, 2008). Erik Cohen is a founding member of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism. He was awarded the UN World Tourism Organization’s Ulysses Prize for 2012. He presently lives and does research in Thailand.