Narrating Crime Whilst Studying: How Crime Myths and Lived Experiences Shape Chinese Students’ Understandings of Crime and Safety in the UK

International students’ stories and perceptions of crime remain an underexplored topic within the fields of crime perception and fear of crime. This article examines how Chinese international students narrate their fear and expectation of crime in the UK and explores how these narratives reflect their acceptance or rejection of dominant crime stories. Drawing on interviews with 21 Chinese students, the study employs thematic and structural narrative analysis to identify key patterns and themes in how participants anticipate, respond to, and make sense of crime in the UK. The findings reveal how differing expectations or imaginaries of crime and lived experiences intertwine to form narrative structures through which participants interpret crime and adjust their behaviour. These structures include narratives of change, narratives of continuity as well as narratives of absence of crime as a pertinent issue