Crime, Fear of

Fear of crime is widespread among people in many Western societies, affecting far more people than the personal experience of crime itself, and as such, it constitutes a significant social problem. Although researchers note that it is a somewhat problematic measure, the question most frequently used to assess fear of crime is “Is there anywhere near where you live where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” Over the past 3 decades, roughly 40 to 50 percent of individuals surveyed in the United States responded affirmatively to this question (or slight variations of it). An international survey conducted in 17 industrialized nations in 2000 found that overall, 17.5 percent of respondents expressed moderate to high fear of crime, ranging from a high of 41 percent in Switzerland to a low of 5 percent in Finland and Sweden.

[Page 181]The single most common reaction to fear of crime is spatial avoidance—that is, avoiding places perceived to be dangerous. In some situations, fear can serve as a beneficial, even life-saving, emotion. However, in other circumstances, fear is an emotion that unnecessarily constrains behavior, restricts personal opportunity and freedom, and, ultimately, threatens the foundation of communities. In addition to generating avoidance behaviors, fear of crime can also lead to significant attitudinal changes—including support for more stringent criminal justice policies and negative attitudes toward members of minority groups, who are frequently portrayed by the media as the main perpetrators of crime.

One of the first large-scale studies of the fear of crime, conducted under the auspices of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice in the late 1960s, found that fear of crime was based less on actual personal victimization and more on inaccurate beliefs about the extent of crime. This study suggested that individuals assess the threat of victimization from information communicated to them through a variety of interpersonal relationships and the media, and from interpretations of symbols of crime to which they are exposed in their local environments. Recent studies of the fear of crime show that, somewhat paradoxically perhaps, individuals who experience the lowest actual rates of criminal victimization (women and the elderly) tend to report the greatest fear of crime, whereas those with higher rates of victimization (especially young minority males) express significantly less fear.

The majority of the general public obtains the bulk of their information about crime from the mass media—including movies, crime drama shows, and news reports. One of the first sophisticated theoretical explanations of the effects of media consumption on individuals was posited by George Gerbner and Larry Gross, whose cultivation hypothesis asserts that television viewing cultivates a “mean world view” characterized by a heightened fear of crime and inflated estimations of personal risks. Although more recent studies have refined this hypothesis and pointed out that media effects are somewhat more nuanced and vary according to the sociodemographic characteristics of media consumers, this mean world view is generated by the media's exaggeration of the frequency and seriousness of crime and major emphasis on violent crime, particularly murder. For instance, although the U.S. murder rate decreased by 20 percent between 1990 and 1998, during the same period the major television network newscasts increased the number of their stories about murder by 600 percent. In addition to a disproportional focus on murder, at various points in time, the media have generated moral panics (and hence fear among the general public) surrounding alleged threats to elderly people's safety, child abductions, and sex offenders, among others. These media depictions also frequently portray the perpetrators of crime as members of marginalized groups such as racial minorities and homeless people, when in reality these individuals most frequently demonized in the media are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime. Perhaps even more problematically, the media's disproportional focus on young black males as the perpetrators of crime can serve to justify more stringent criminal justice policies and expenditures and the elimination of social support systems, such as welfare and job creation programs.

...