Crime scripts as basis for harm assessment: The case of piracy

• In Event: Sticking to the script? Innovations in organised crime reduction

Abstract

Since Cornish’s formative papers, crime script analysis has grown considerably and has since been applied to numerous crime-types, simple and complex. Crime scripts are also used by policymakers and private entities to identify possible intervention points to disrupt the crime commission process.
Applying this approach to piracy, we first construct the scripts—or business models—of piracy. To do so, we use quantitative and qualitative data from our previous work on Nigerian piracy as well as newly collected data concerning piracy in other parts of the world and particularly in the Singapore Straits.
Second, we show how crime scripts can serve as the basis for assessing the harms of criminal activities in a systematic and empirical way, using piracy as a case. For such an assessment, we rely on Greenfield and Paoli’s harm assessment framework. Following its steps, we 1) identify possible harms arising from piracy and affecting individuals, private and public sector entities or the social and physical environment; 2) assess the incidence of piracy and its harms in the selected regional contexts; 3) assess the severity of these harms; 4) prioritize the harms on the basis of their combined incidence and severity; and 5) investigate their causality, in particularly considering to what extent such harms arise from the policy environment and associated interventions.
While the analysis of the newer data is still ongoing, the case study of Nigerian piracy has already produced interesting and policy relevant findings, proving the merits of both script analysis and a systematic harm assessment. In fact, such analysis showed that affected individuals – especially local fishermen and seafarers – and small-scale fishing businesses suffer the most serious harm and hence questioned the current policy focus on the financial harms suffered by large-scale shipping companies.

Authors

• Letizia Paoli, KU Leuven Faculty of Law and Criminology

• Bryan C Peters, KU Leuven, Faculty of Law and Criminology