Yet most scholars now agree that fear of crime involves ... more general perceptions of crime in the neigh- borhood .... about crime affected their quality of life.
Fear of Crime JONATHAN JACKSON and IOANNA GOUSETI Fifty years of criminological research have produced a variety of definitions of fear of crime. Yet most scholars now agree that fear of crime involves feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, all of which are focused on the subjectively conceived threat of criminal victimization (Ferraro, 1995; Hale, 1996; Vanderveen, 2006; Farrall, Jackson, & Gray, 2009). Such an approach to conceptualization is precise, for it delimits fear of crime from more general perceptions of crime in the neighborhood, concerns about the effects of crime on society, and global assessments of the safety of our streets and homes. But it is also expansive, because the ABC distinction between affect, behavior, and cognition captures multiple dimensions of fear of crime which are themselves multifaceted. Looking at the empirical evidence, the affective aspect of “fear” of crime seems to involve a number of emotions about the possibility of victimization. These emotions include rare physical responses to immediate threat (“fear”), a more general patterning of repetitive thoughts about future uncertain harm (“worry”), and an even more widespread but diffuse, low-level emotion (“anxiety”) quite separate from concrete feelings of imminent danger. It is also clear from the extant literature that these are difficult emotions to measure. While Warr (2000) defines fear as a: physical feeling of alarm or dread caused by an awareness or expectation of danger … ordinarily (though not invariably) associated with certain physiological changes, including increased heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, decreased salivation, and increased galvanic skin response (pp. 453–454),
he also argues that survey questions like “How afraid are you about being burgled?” capture not physical fear but rather a future-oriented anxiety
among respondents. Respondents are unlikely to be physically afraid of being burgled at the time of the interview. By contrast to concrete episodes of fear, anxiety is a low-level and diffuse unease about uncertain future events. In Hough’s (2004) words: “Leaving aside acute anxiety attacks, anxiety is not comprised of a series of events that can be located in space and time. Rather, it is a rumbling state of unease, often partly submerged, sometimes fully surfacing” (p. 174). A similar distinction has been made in the United Kingdom, but this time between worry and anxiety. Worry about falling victim refers to past concrete mental events of repetitive thoughts and concerns. Berenbaum (2010) defines worry as: “repetitive thoughts that also have all three of the following characteristics: (1) the repetitive thoughts concern an uncertain future outcome; (2) the uncertain outcome about which the person is thinking is considered undesirable; and (3) the subjective experience of having such thoughts is unpleasant” (p. 963). Again, it is difficult to design questions that unambiguously measure a particular emotion’s relevance in people’s everyday lives. Analyzing data from the British Crime Survey, Farrall and colleagues (2009) found that a good proportion of individuals who said they were “very” or “fairly” worried also reported that they had not worried even once over the past 12 months. Actual and recallable moments of fear or worry were rare. A good proportion of those individuals who reported some overall intensity of worry were not able to recall a single instance when their emotions surfaced. In such circumstances, diffuse anxiety, and a sense of psychologically proximate risk, again seems the best descriptor. Consider a (hypothetical) female who says she is worried about being robbed or mugged in the street. She cannot recall a time over the past 12 months in which she worried about the possibility; she feels some sort of anxiety about future harm; she has not recently experienced concrete mental events of emotional experience (e.g., worry). Being attacked in the street seems to be an emotionally significant possibility; she represents the risk as personally relevant and
The Encyclopedia of Theoretical Criminology, First Edition. Edited by J. Mitchell Miller. © 2014 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2014 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118517390/wbetc130
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consequential; she can bring to mind a mental image of being robbed or mugged in a given context (cf. Jackson, 2011); and she reports being worried about this uncertain but psychologically threatening outcome. When answering questions about her emotions towards the risk of falling victim of crime, she may partly be expressing “situation-specific beliefs” (Robinson & Clore, 2002a, 2002b) about how she would feel if she was in a given set of situations. Even if she rarely actually finds herself alone in the street after dark, she thinks she would feel worried in such a situation, so she reports being worried about the possibility. She may also be reporting what Robinson and Clore call “identityrelated beliefs.” These are situation-independent beliefs about past emotions that aggregate emotions across diverse situations according to both personality and social norms. Saying she is “very worried” may be to partly express something akin to: “I am the sort of person who worries about being mugged or robbed in the street.” Moreover, since vulnerability is stereotypically compatible with traditional notions of femininity, identity-related beliefs raise an important issue of gender-specific impression management (cf. Sutton, Robinson, & Farrall, 2011). If answers to fear of crime survey questions work in part to express identity and gendered norms (Sutton & Farrall, 2005; Cops & Pleysier, 2011), then men and women may draw partly upon identity-related semantic knowledge (e.g., gender stereotypes) when thinking about their worry about crime. What about behavioral responses to feeling threatened by crime? There appear to be four main categories of behavioral responses to perceived risk of victimization and emotional responses to threat: avoidance behavior, protective behavior, behavioral and lifestyle adjustments, and participation in relevant collective activities (Miethe, 1995, pp. 21–26). Avoidance strategies include the minimization of one’s contact with “hot spots,” such as deprived neighborhoods, entertainment places, and parks, especially at certain times, and with particular types of people such as strangers, groups of youngsters, and beggars, as well as avoidance of routine activities such as traveling on public transport or shopping at particular stores. Protective behavior consists basically of activities that aim to deter or resist crime, such as situational crime
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CRIME prevention measures (e.g., installing alarms, locking doors, increasing lighting, owning a gun) and wider activities of self-protection (e.g., taking self-defense training, traveling in groups). Behavioral and lifestyle changes include withdrawal of common activities that are considered to be dangerous, such as subway usage at night, drinking in bars, and other nighttime activities. Finally, collective responses to the risk of crime encompass participation in relevant community groups, such as neighborhood watch programs and self-help or support groups, in promotion of victim and witness programs, and related legislative initiatives. Cross-sectional studies of behavioral strategies face a number of methodological challenges (Rengifo & Bolton, 2012, p. 102). For example, is behavior a consequence as well as a cause of the emotional responses to the risk of crime? The constraint of social behavior due to low levels of perceived safety may create a feedback loop by which more fear leads to more social isolation, and subsequently even higher fear levels (Liska, Sanchirico, & Reede, 1988). The type of behavior may also matter here. Differentiating between general behavioral patterns along voluntary and compulsory domains, Rengifo and Bolton (2012) found that routine activities were correlated with variation in cognitive assessments of victimization risk and disorder, and that these two constructs predicted behavioral patterns in different directions – more frequent voluntary activities were linked to a heightened sense of risk of crime and lower perceived disorders. “Functional” and motivational properties of worrying have also been highlighted in the criminological literature (Jackson & Gray, 2010; Gray, Jackson, & Farrall, 2011). For some people, worry about crime can be a problem-solving activity, while for others it can be something that damages their well-being. Examining the productive and counterproductive effects of fear of crime on subjective well-being and precautionary activities, Jackson and Gray (2010) found that a significant minority of individuals who said that they were worried about crime also reported that they took precautions, which made them feel safer; and that neither their precautions nor their worries about crime affected their quality of life. In such circumstances “worry” might be better viewed as a functional defense against crime involving socially beneficial behavior – something that
FEAR allows individuals to exert control over perceived risks, rather than an inherently “dysfunctional” feeling that damages their quality of life. The final part of the ABC of fear of crime refers to people’s cognitive assessments of personal threat and risk. Criminological work has shown that the perception of the likelihood of victimization is strongly correlated with expressed levels of fear about the event occurring (Ferraro, 1995; Farrall et al., 2009). But a number of studies have also shown the relevance of people’s sense of the seriousness of the consequences if they were to fall victim and people’s sense of control over its occurrence (Jackson, 2009, 2011, 2013). This work may suggest that fear is generated and sustained by a sense of risk, threat, and vulnerability that is comprised of perceived likelihood, consequence, and control (Killias, 1990; Hale, 1996; Gabriel & Greve, 2003; Farrall et al., 2009; Jackson, 2009, 2011). Warr (1987), for example, examined the relationships between perceived likelihood and perceived seriousness of crime and expressed levels of fear of crime, concluding that perceptions of the seriousness of a given crime combined with subjective probabilities of its occurrence strongly predict fear. Furthermore, Jackson (2011) found that when individuals perceived crime to be especially serious in its personal impact, and that they have little personal control over the victimization event occurring, a lower level of perceived likelihood was needed to stimulate worry about crime. Thus there seems to be multiplicative effects of perceived likelihood, control, and consequence on emotional response to risk. Subjective probabilities combine with construal of the outcome to predict general worry, anxiety, and fear. There is a strong overlap between perceived risk and perceived susceptibility (i.e., vulnerability) to crime. According to Killias (1990), there are physical, social, and situational dimensions of vulnerability related to three aspects of threat: “exposure to non-negligible risk,” “loss of control,” and “seriousness of consequences.” Perceived risk may mediate the association between markers of vulnerability (typically, socio-demographic variables, such as gender and age) and expressed emotion. Jackson (2009) found that females tend to worry more frequently than males partly because they feel less able to physically defend themselves; they have lower perceived self-efficacy; they have
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higher perceived negative impact; and they see the likelihood of victimization as greater for themselves and for their social group. The notion of perceived vulnerability has obvious implications for the “rationality debate,” which has marked criminological inquiry (Sparks, 1992). On the one hand, any mismatch between fear of crime and actual crime rates (typically, when people worry “more than is necessary”) indicates the “irrationality” of individuals, with the media often getting much of the blame. On the other hand, if one accepts that people’s perceptions of risk include notions of likelihood, control, and consequence, then one is faced with the complex task of determining what exactly constitutes a match. Arguably, one has to calculate not just the probability of victimization, but also some sense of the “objective” controllability of crime and its consequences for a given individual in a given context. If one does believe that some individuals feel that crime is somehow less personally controllable and more personally consequential than they “should,” then one is faced with a morally and politically difficult task. For example, it is difficult to tell people deemed to be irrational that they should feel more in control of the risk of crime and that the consequences are not as bad as they fear. So “fear” is complex and multifaceted. What about “crime”? “Fear of crime” describes a general phenomenon using common or everyday language, but it needs greater specificity if it is to be an analytically useful concept. Distinguishing “fear” from general concerns about crime and focusing on personal risk, and defining “fear” as three interlinked aspects (A, affect; B, behavior; and C, cognition) related to subjective threat of victimization, brings some much needed clarity to the issue. Yet, how we define “crime” also shapes the boundaries of the construct. If crime stands for the perceived risk of victimization, and if people project that risk onto low-level neighborhood conditions and pick up images of crime and risk via circulating information (in the mass media, for example), then a more complete definition of fear of crime needs to account for the different ways in which people see and respond to risk, and generate representations of dangerousness. For example, studies about people’s perceptions of
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neighborhood disorder and social cohesion suggest that fear of crime is partly about how people perceive and respond to particular environments and situations. Neighborhood disorder refers to a range of subtle and not so subtle cues in the social and physical environment, which include graffiti, broken windows, and young people “hanging around” in public spaces. These are events and symbols of “communicative action” (Innes, 2004): they have meaning above and beyond their mere presence, in that they represent a weakened social order, an erosion of shared commitments to dominant norms and values, a failure of authorities to regulate behavior in public space, and personal risk and threat. But what constitutes disorder is partly in the eye of the observer. According to Sampson (2009, p. 12), when people judge disorder to be a problem, they combine “uncertain evidence with prior beliefs underwritten by cultural stereotypes.” Sampson and Raudenbush (2004) found that signifiers of disorder and uncivil behavior were viewed as especially problematic by residents of Chicago who lived in particular neighborhoods. Specifically, objective events observed in the streets, coupled with stereotypical perceptions of ethnic minorities and poverty, prompted disorderly cues to be perceived more severely when they took place in especially deprived and ethnically diverse areas. We urgently need more research on this issue. On that note, we finish with just one among a number of promising lines of inquiry. We hope that future research will explore whether fear of crime involves certain psychological mechanisms of stereotyping and identity. We know from psychological research that emotions can have a powerful effect on social cognition and motivated attention. By projecting threat, deviance, and hostile intent onto certain groups of people or behaviors, a disorderly element may be one that signals to the observer what Body-Gendrot (2009) calls: “an adversarial social assimilation, a desire not to conform to the social norms of the ‘law-abiders’” (p. 67). In turn, designating individuals, activities, and communities as “criminal” may be to label them as somehow lacking – on the wrong side of acceptability, in need of sanction and censure (Harcourt, 2001, pp. 24–29). The identification of dangerous individuals may also operate to establish “immoral communities.”
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CRIME Scapegoating a group to represent a particular or topical social problem can perpetuate normative boundaries of social conduct, roles, and judgment, as well as strengthen one’s own social identity – reinforcing community boundaries in contrast to the perceived threat.
SEE ALSO: Collective Efficacy Theory; Costs of Crime; Punitive Populism. References Berenbaum, H. (2010). An initiation–termination twophase model of worrying. Clinical Psychology Review, 30, 962–975. Body-Gendrot, S. (2009). A plea for urban disorder. British Journal of Sociology, 60, 65–73. Cops, D., & Pleysier, S. (2011). Doing gender in fear of crime: The impact of gender identity on reported levels of fear of crime in adolescents and young adults. British Journal of Criminology, 51(1), 58–74. Farrall, S., Jackson, J., & Gray, E. (2009). Social order and the fear of crime in contemporary times. Clarendon Studies in Criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferraro, K. F. (1995). Fear of crime. Interpreting victimization risk. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gabriel, U., & Greve, W. (2003). The psychology of fear of crime: Conceptual and methodological perspectives. British Journal of Criminology, 43, 600–614. Gray, E., Jackson, J., & Farrall, S. (2011). Feelings and functions in the fear of crime: Applying a new approach to victimisation insecurity. British Journal of Criminology, 51, 75–94. Hale, C. (1996). Fear of crime: A review of the literature. International Review of Victimology, 4(2), 79–150. Harcourt, B. E. (2001). Illusion of order: The false promise of broken windows policing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hough, M. (2004). Worry about crime: Mental events or mental states? International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 7, 173–176. Innes, M. (2004). Signal crimes and signal disorders. British Journal of Sociology, 55, 335–355. Jackson, J. (2009). A psychological perspective on vulnerability in the fear of crime. Psychology, Crime and Law, 15(4), 365–390. Jackson, J. (2011). Revisiting risk sensitivity in the fear of crime. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 48(4), 513–537. Jackson, J. (2013). Cognitive closure and risk sensitivity in the fear of crime. Legal and Criminological Psychology. doi: 10.1111/lcrp.12031.
FEAR Jackson, J., & Gray, E. (2010). Functional fear and public insecurities about crime. British Journal of Criminology, 50(1), 1–22. Killias, M. (1990). Vulnerability: Towards a better understanding of a key variable in the genesis of fear of crime. Violence and Victims, 5(2), 97–108. Liska, A. E., Sanchirico, A., & Reede, M. D. (1988). Fear of crime and constrained behavior: Specifying and estimating a reciprocal effects model. Social Forces, 66, 827–837. Miethe, T. (1995). Fear and withdrawal from urban life. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 539, 14–27. Rengifo, A. F., & Bolton, A. (2012). Routine activities and fear of crime: Specifying individual-level mechanisms. European Journal of Criminology, 9(2), 99–119. Robinson, M. D., & Clore, G. L. (2002a). Belief and feeling: Evidence for an accessibility model of emotional self-report. Psychological Bulletin, 128(6), 934–960. Robinson, M. D., & Clore, G. L. (2002b). Episodic and semantic knowledge in emotional self-report: Evidence for two judgment processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(1), 198–215. Sampson, R. J. (2009). Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: Social disorder revisited. British Journal of Sociology, 601, 1–31.
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Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2004). Seeing disorder: Neighborhood stigma and the social construction of “broken windows”. Social Psychology Quarterly, 67, 319–342. Sparks, R. (1992). Reason and unreason in the "left realism": Some problems in the constitution of the fear of crime. In R. Matthews & J. Young (Eds.) Issues in Realist Criminology, (pp. 119–135). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sutton, R. M., & Farrall, S. (2005). Gender, socially desirable responding, and the fear of crime: Are women really more anxious about crime? British Journal of Criminology, 45(2), 212–224. Sutton, R. M., Robinson, B., & Farrall, S. (2011). Gender, fear of crime, and self-presentation: An experimental investigation. Psychology, Crime and Law, 17(5), 421–433. Vanderveen, G. (2006). Interpreting fear, crime, risk and unsafety. Cullompton: Willan. Warr, M. (1987). Fear of victimization and sensitivity to risk. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 3(1), 29–46. Warr, M. (2000). Fear of crime in the United States: Avenues for research and policy. Criminal Justice, 4, 451–489.
