Dark Tourism and Crime

This book offers a unique insight into a type of tourism that is becoming increasingly popular in the contemporary world – dark tourism. This type of tourism chiefly concerns tourism that occurs in places where death and suffering have taken place on a grand scale. Whereas all books devoted to dark tourism include places where natural or man-made disasters have occurred (e.g. Pompeii, medieval plague sites, ocean liner sinking), this book will specifically engage with dark tourism sites associated with crime (e.g. mass murder, genocide, State sanctioned torture and violence).

Dark Tourism and Crime explores the socio-cultural contours of this unique type of tourism and explains why spaces/places where crime has occurred fascinate and attract tourists. The book is marked by an ethics of respect for the suffering a place has experienced and an imperative to learn something tangible about the history and legacy of that suffering. Based on empirical ethnographic research it takes the reader from the remnants of Auschwitz concentration camp to the tranquil Australian island of Tasmania to explore precisely what things a dark tourist might encounter (architecture, art installations, gardens, memorials, physical traces of crime) and how these things invoke and evoke past crimes.

This volume furthers understanding of dark tourism and will be of interest to students, researchers and academics of criminology, tourism and cultural studies.

Derek Dalton is an Associate Professor in Criminal Justice at Flinders University Law School. His research interests cluster around the conflation of homosexuality and criminality. In 2012 he co-edited ‘Policing Sex’ (Routledge) with Paul Johnson. More recently, a project exploring tourism in sites where major crime has occurred (e.g. Auschwitz, the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia, Port Arthur in Tasmania etcetera) has evolved over eight years of research.