Public Insecurities About Crime: A Review of the British Research Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
Theorising the fear of crime: the cultural and social significance of insecurities about crime
2007
As well as receiving much attention at an empirical and descriptive level, the fear of crime has, of course, received considerable theoretical attention. Theoretical work, as one might well imagine, does not always proceed smoothly, and efforts have met with varying degrees of empirical success. Indeed, few of the theoretical models have been sufficiently ambitious to fully appreciate this complex social phenomenon.
A large body of empirical research exploring emotional responses to crime in Europe, North America and elsewhere suggests that substantial proportions of the public worry about victimisation. The British Crime Survey (BCS) has asked questions exploring worry about crime of English and Welsh respondents since 1982, and in the 2003/2004 sweep of the BCS new questions were inserted into a subsection to explore the frequency and intensity of such fearful events. As well as illustrating the rationale of the new measurement strategy, this research note reports the results of the new questions in direct relation to the ‘old’ methods. The findings show that few people experience specific events of worry on a frequent basis, and that ‘old’ style questions magnify the everyday experience of fear. We propose that ‘worry about crime’ is often best seen as a diffuse anxiety about risk, rather than any pattern of everyday concerns over personal safety.
The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods
This chapter provides a critical overview of research on public insecurities about crime. Spanning several decades and continents, this body of work tends to focus on negative emotional responses (fear, worry or anxiety) to the threat of common crime categories (burglary, theft, assault). First, the chapter charts the emergence of the fear of crime from the policy-relevant victimisations surveys of the 1960s in America, to its transformation into a staple feature of government statistics and object of academic significance. Despite the topic's high status however, it has remained a slippery research subject-with real methodological complexities at its core. We outline some important breakthroughs from feminist and 'left realist' scholars, and highlight advances using experience-based questions and the 'expressive' dimensions of public insecurities about crime. Recognising the value of interdisciplinary research, we review what criminologists studying the fear of crime might learn from the 'psychology of survey response', studies in 'everyday emotions', and the better use of quantitative techniques and longitudinal data to capture the multidimensional and dynamic nature of fear.
Afraid or Angry? Recalibrating the ‘fear’ of Crime
1999
Studying the fear of crime is a research field that has grown enormously in the past two decades. Yet our empirical knowledge has grown at the expense of conceptual development. It is beginning to be suspected that 'fear' is a term encompassing a confusing variety of feelings, perspectives, risk-estimations, and which thus means different things to different people. It is additionally suggested that what we know empirically may well be largely an artefact of the fact that the questions that are put repeatedly to respondents seldom vary, and the ways that those questions are put, and the settings in which they are put seldom change. The research project which is in part reported here initially used one set of respondents to develop new questions relating to their general and specific feelings about criminal victimisation, before testing them on another, much larger sample. This latter exercise confirmed that being 'angry' about the threat of criminal victimisation is more frequently reported than being 'afraid' of it. Little is known of the meaning or range of meanings that respondents infer with the term 'anger', but further research -which is neededmight well show that anger about crime is as complicated a concept as fear of crime has transpired to be. In any event, research into anger should benefit from the lessons learnt from three decades of research into fear.
Combining the new and old measures of the fear of crime: Exploring the ‘worried-well’
2006
Previously in this series, our Working Papers have touched on how respondents answer questions about their anxieties abut crime; they have explored the origins of the fear of crime; and they have presented a first look at the basic frequencies for the data we are most concerned with. In this paper, the fourth in our series, we will start to explore in more depth the relationship between our two styles of measuring the fear of crime. We also examine the distribution of fear in the population in the light of our new measurement tools.
Feelings and Functions in the Fear of Crime: Applying a New Approach to Victimisation Insecurity
This paper presents a new definition of fear of crime that integrates two conceptual developments in this enduring field of criminological enquiry. Our measurement strategy differentiates first between specific worries and diffuse anxieties in emotional responses to crime, and second between productive and counter-productive effects on subjective well-being and precautionary activities. Drawing on data from a representative survey of seven London neighbourhoods, these distinctions are combined into an ordinal scale that moves from the ‘unworried’, to low-level motivating emotions, to frequent and dysfunctional worry about crime. We demonstrate that different categories of ‘fear’ have different correlates and explain different levels of variation in public confidence in policing. We conclude with a call for more longitudinal research to uncover the dynamic nature of fear of crime over the life-course.
In search of the fear of crime
Abstract: This chapter provides a critical overview of research on public insecurities about crime. Spanning several decades and continents, this body of work tends to focus on negative emotional responses (fear, worry or anxiety) to the threat of common crime categories (burglary, theft, assault). First, the chapter charts the emergence of the fear of crime from the policy-relevant victimisations surveys of the 1960s in America, to its transformation into a staple feature of government statistics and object of academic significance. Despite the topic‘s high status however, it has remained a slippery research subject - with real methodological complexities at its core. We outline some important breakthroughs from feminist and ‗left realist‘ scholars, and highlight advances using experience-based questions and the ‗expressive‘ dimensions of public insecurities about crime. Recognising the value of interdisciplinary research, we review what criminologists studying the fear of crime might learn from the ‗psychology of survey response‘, studies in ‗everyday emotions‘, and the better use of quantitative techniques and longitudinal data to capture the multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of fear.
Fear of crime in late modernity and how it affects society
Articlesbase, 2013
In the last two decades, fear of crime has increasingly become a prominent concern of policy-makers across the political spectrum. Mirroring the way that left realist criminology to recaptured the issue of crime after its 'theft' by the Conservatives, fear of crime has come to be perceived as an acute problem by the right as much as the left. At times it has been regarded as equally problematic as crime itself. In 1989, for example, a Home Office Working Party declared that fear of crime was an "issue of social concern that has to be taken as seriously as crime prevention and reduction" (Home Office 1989: ii). Although the Official policy emphasis has now shifted back to prioritizing crime reduction, fear of crime remains a prominent concern. The media have consistently been seen by policy-makers as a major source of the problem, stimulating unrealistic and irrational fears by exaggerating and sensationalizing the risks and seriousness of crime (Sparks, 1992; Hope and Sparks, 2000).