Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

Discussion
Looking at tourists as a special victim type highlights the contribution made by the
victims to their victimization, perhaps more so than would be the case in other vic-
timization contexts. The status and role of tourists and their behavior places them
outside the bounds of the mundane and creates a special relationship with the host
location and host population. While their relationship with the actors in the insti-
tutionalized tourist settings is standardized and for the most part legitimate, their
search for the authentic and backstage experiences brings them into contact with
an altogether different set of actors who may be in a position to exploit them. As
Ryan and Kinder (1996, p. 24) have suggested, being a tourist includes a range of
behaviors that, perhaps, would not be tolerated in a non-tourist context, but in the
tourist context which includes tourist space and place, carousing late at night,
drunkenness, and seeking sexual liaisons and drugs is tolerated. The tourist,
because of the nature of the role, is allowed greater latitude and, in the present con-
text, this latitude increases vulnerability to criminal victimization. Their behavior
is expected to be different because they are tourists and are to some degree
expected, at least in the context described here, to be acting at the margins of legal-
ity. Being tourists, in terms of the role expectations and anonymity coupled with
the nature of touristic places, increases the opportunities to look for and find illicit
action and decreases the chances of being caught and exposed to significant oth-
ers. Concomitantly, the presence of tourists in large numbers creates many vulner-
able targets and opportunities for motivated offenders to commit robberies.
In Cohen’s theoretical work on the phenomenology of tourism experiences, he
develops what he refers to as a recreational mode of tourism experience (Cohen,
1979a). The recreational form views the touristic experience as a type of enter-
tainment akin to other types of entertainment; an activity to be enjoyed for its
restorative and recreative powers, in a sense, not unlike the religious pilgrimages
of old. The present research expands the recreational mode of tourism experience
by adding the dimension of tourism as an escapist activity that allows tourists to
play out certain hedonistic desires away from the eyes of significant others (e.g.,
family, friends, and workmates). Furthermore, tourists, in this instance, may or
may not be motivated by feelings of alienation from their mundane everyday lives
or feel they need to be recreated for that matter, they simply use the tourist role as
an opportunity to seek and find experiences not normally available to them in their
everyday lives.
Finally, the experience of crime victimization as a tourist perhaps gives some
concrete meaning to the notion of the tourist moment (Cary, 2003). Victimization
is a serendipitous moment in the sense that the outcome of the search for authen-
ticity is unanticipated. No one ever really intends to be a crime victim. Yet the risk
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taken by tourists in seeking out the authentic has led to their victimization. The vic-
timized tourists have now gone beyond the subjective experience of being simply
tourists and have discovered themselves in an experience they never anticipated.