Environmental Crimes in the Rural Regions - Case of Slovakia

Abstract

Environmental crime still does not have a single definition and it depends on various factors such as the professional orientation of the researcher, natural resources of the country, or aims of international organisations and institutions. In Slovakia, criminology is not interested in environmental criminality very much; there are only a few publications oriented towards environmental crimes or books of criminology which include environmental criminality. The aim of this paper is to summarize the theoretical approaches to the issue of environmental crimes by various researchers and to identify the activities considered as environmental crimes in Slovakia and to find out whether environmental criminality is more typical for rural areas or urban areas similarly to other kinds of criminality. We investigate the development of environmental crimes in the period 2001- 2015 in Slovakia and in the particular regions (NUTS III) and make predictions for the next five years.