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Special edition Prevention and safety politics in Europe

Special edition Prevention and safety politics in Europe This special edition represents an important development in the evolution of Community Safety Journal. To date contributions have been focused on research, Special edition policy and practice issues in the UK context. In this edition, we make some tentative steps towards the generation of an explicitly international set of debates around Prevention and community safety and crime prevention. We focus on trends and themes that have come to the fore in the last three decades across Western Europe and latterly in the safety politics ‘new’ European democracies. It is important to note that the contributions gathered here from members of the European Governance of Public Safety Research in Europe Network make no claim to represent either a comprehensive overview or typical cross-section of processes and issues ‘on the ground’ across the varying localities of Europe. Instead this collection of essays should be read as introductions and critical overviews of particular national cases (de Maillard on France, Goris on Belgium, Nobili on Italy, Zarafonitou on Greece) supplemented by two broader comparative overviews (Hughes & Edwards and Walklate). We hope our predominantly UK readership will find the contributions here both insightful and valuable not only for highlighting some of the convergent and divergent trends at work across different nations in Europe but also for the questions they raise with regard to the ‘British’ model of crime prevention and community safety. There are clearly lessons to be drawn for practitioners, policy makers and researchers in the UK in the light of the discussion and debate generated in this Gordon Hughes special edition. Policy transfer and lesson-drawing should not be viewed as a one- International Centre for Comparative Criminological way voyage of ideas and practices from the UK across the Channel! As Sandra Research Walklate points out in the concluding article of this issue, perhaps the greatest The Open University challenge and lesson for us in the UK from examining continental European cases is that the latter have possibly held on to community safety and ‘protection’ as a public and irremediably social good whereas in the UK (and USA) such notions have been eroded as a result of the rampant process of marketisation and privatised consumerism. That noted, it is difficult to ignore the simultaneous trends towards fragmentation and integration, the unsettling of the old state-based public services, the promotion of multi-agency partnerships and the participation of members of local publics (if not ‘communities’) in the third sector of prevention and the governance of public safety. In this issue we have examples of ‘old-timers’ in the field of crime prevention as a national project (France), of countries with strong but uneven ‘regional’ traditions of public safety strategies (Italy), of countries with a firm commitment to ‘multi-agency partnership’ work (Belgium), and of ‘newcomers’ to the policies and politics of prevention rather than ‘repression’ (Greece). This issue obviously leaves out some important preventive and safety initiatives in other regions of Europe, such as Scandinavia, Holland and much of Southern and Central Europe. Nonetheless it is hoped that this initial collection will help generate a wider debate on the trends in preventive and safety policies that are highlighted in the first paper of this collection. For further details of the Network please contact g.h.hughes@open.ac.uk 2 Community Safety Journal • Volume 3 Issue 1 • January 2004 © Pavilion editorial http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Safer Communities Emerald Publishing

Special edition Prevention and safety politics in Europe

Safer Communities , Volume 3 (1): 1 – Jan 1, 2004

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Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN
1757-8043
DOI
10.1108/17578043200400001
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This special edition represents an important development in the evolution of Community Safety Journal. To date contributions have been focused on research, Special edition policy and practice issues in the UK context. In this edition, we make some tentative steps towards the generation of an explicitly international set of debates around Prevention and community safety and crime prevention. We focus on trends and themes that have come to the fore in the last three decades across Western Europe and latterly in the safety politics ‘new’ European democracies. It is important to note that the contributions gathered here from members of the European Governance of Public Safety Research in Europe Network make no claim to represent either a comprehensive overview or typical cross-section of processes and issues ‘on the ground’ across the varying localities of Europe. Instead this collection of essays should be read as introductions and critical overviews of particular national cases (de Maillard on France, Goris on Belgium, Nobili on Italy, Zarafonitou on Greece) supplemented by two broader comparative overviews (Hughes & Edwards and Walklate). We hope our predominantly UK readership will find the contributions here both insightful and valuable not only for highlighting some of the convergent and divergent trends at work across different nations in Europe but also for the questions they raise with regard to the ‘British’ model of crime prevention and community safety. There are clearly lessons to be drawn for practitioners, policy makers and researchers in the UK in the light of the discussion and debate generated in this Gordon Hughes special edition. Policy transfer and lesson-drawing should not be viewed as a one- International Centre for Comparative Criminological way voyage of ideas and practices from the UK across the Channel! As Sandra Research Walklate points out in the concluding article of this issue, perhaps the greatest The Open University challenge and lesson for us in the UK from examining continental European cases is that the latter have possibly held on to community safety and ‘protection’ as a public and irremediably social good whereas in the UK (and USA) such notions have been eroded as a result of the rampant process of marketisation and privatised consumerism. That noted, it is difficult to ignore the simultaneous trends towards fragmentation and integration, the unsettling of the old state-based public services, the promotion of multi-agency partnerships and the participation of members of local publics (if not ‘communities’) in the third sector of prevention and the governance of public safety. In this issue we have examples of ‘old-timers’ in the field of crime prevention as a national project (France), of countries with strong but uneven ‘regional’ traditions of public safety strategies (Italy), of countries with a firm commitment to ‘multi-agency partnership’ work (Belgium), and of ‘newcomers’ to the policies and politics of prevention rather than ‘repression’ (Greece). This issue obviously leaves out some important preventive and safety initiatives in other regions of Europe, such as Scandinavia, Holland and much of Southern and Central Europe. Nonetheless it is hoped that this initial collection will help generate a wider debate on the trends in preventive and safety policies that are highlighted in the first paper of this collection. For further details of the Network please contact g.h.hughes@open.ac.uk 2 Community Safety Journal • Volume 3 Issue 1 • January 2004 © Pavilion editorial

Journal

Safer CommunitiesEmerald Publishing

Published: Jan 1, 2004

There are no references for this article.