revised version

Fear of Crime: An Entry to the Encyclopedia of Theoretical Criminology Jonathan Jackson1, Methodology Institute and Mannheim Centre for Criminology, LSE Ioanna Gouseti, Methodology Institute, LSE

Abstract Fear of crime describes a range of different feelings, thoughts and behaviours that people have regarding the subjective risk of criminal victimization. In this entry the main conclusions of criminological inquiry on these feelings, thoughts and behaviours are reviewed. We also consider the ways in which individuals impute criminal threat onto individuals, groups and community conditions, and propose possible avenues for future research. Key words: fear of crime, risk perception, crime precaution .

This is a pre-publication version of an entry submitted to the Encyclopedia of Theoretical Criminology (general editor J. Mitchell Miller), Wiley-Blackwell

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Dr Jonathan Jackson, Methodology Institute, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom, Tel: 0044 207 955 7652, Email: [email protected]

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Fifty years of criminological research has produced a variety of different definitions of fear of crime. Yet, most scholars now agree that fear of crime involves feelings, thoughts and behaviours, all of which are focused on the subjective personal threat of criminal victimization (see inter alia, Ferraro, 1995; Hale, 1996; Vanderveen, 2006; Farrall et al., 2009). Such an approach to conceptualization is precise, for it delimits fear of crime from more general perceptions of crime in the neighbourhood, 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, behaviour and cognition captures multiple dimensions of fear of crime that are themselves multi-faceted. Affect Looking across the available empirical evidence, the affective aspect of “fear” of crime seems to involve a number of different emotions towards 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 a more widespread but diffuse low-level emotion that sits quite separate to concrete feelings of imminent danger (“anxiety”). Warr (2000: 453-454) 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 ”. But he also argues that survey questions like “How afraid are you about being burgled?" capture not physical fear but rather a future-orientated anxiety among respondents, mostly because 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 future uncertain events. In Hough’s (2004: 174) 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.” A similar distinction has been made in the UK, but this time between worry and anxiety. Worry about falling victim refers to past concrete mental events of repetitive thoughts and concerns. Berenbaum (2010: 963) 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.” Yet, analysing data from the British Crime Survey, Farrall et al. (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 twelve 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, future-orientated anxiety again seems the best descriptor. The findings of Farrall and colleagues remind us that it is not easy to measure emotions using selfreport survey methodology (Robinson and Clore, 2002a and 2002b). 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 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 and Clore, 2002a and 2002b) about how 2

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 et al., 2011). If answers to fear of crime survey questions work in part to express identity and gendered norms (Sutton and Farrall, 2005; Cops and 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. Behaviour There appear to be four main categories of behavioural responses to perceived risk of victimization and fear of crime: avoidance behaviour, protective behaviour, behavioural and lifestyle adjustments, and participation in relevant collective activities (Miethe, 1995: 21-26). Avoidance strategies include the minimization of one’s contact with “hot spot” locations (such as deprived neighbourhoods, entertainment places, parks, especially at certain times) and with particular types of people (such as strangers, groups of youngsters, beggars) as well as avoidance of routine activities, (e.g., travelling on public transport, shopping at particular stores). Protective behaviour consists basically of activities that aim to deter or resist crime, such as situational crime prevention measures (e.g., installing alarms, locking doors, increasing lighting, owning guns) and wider activities of self-protection (e.g., taking self-defense training, travelling in groups). Behavioural and lifestyle changes include withdrawal of common activities that are considered to be dangerous, such as subway usage at night, bar attendance and other nighttime activities. Finally, collective responses to the risk of crime encompass participation in relevant community groups, such as neighbourhood watch programs and self-help or support groups, in promotion of victim and witness programs, and related legislative initiatives. Like studies into people’s emotions about crime-risk, studies into behavioural strategies have faced methodological challenges (see Regnifo and Bolton, 2012: 102). Is behaviour not just a consequence but also a cause of the emotional responses to the risk of crime? For example, the constraint of social behaviour (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 (see Liska et al., 1988). The type of behaviour may also matter here. Differentiating between general behavioural patterns along voluntary and compulsory domains, Regnifo 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 behavioural patterns in different directions, i.e. more frequent voluntary activities were linked to 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 and Gray, 2010; Gray et al., 2011). For some people, worry about crime can be a problem-solving activity. 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 defence against crime involving socially beneficial behaviour – something that allows individuals to exert control over perceived risks rather than an inherently “dysfunctional” feeling that damages their well-being. Cognition

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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 (e.g., 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 (e.g., Jackson, 2009). Fear may thus be generated and sustained by a sense of risk, threat and vulnerability that is comprised of perceived likelihood, consequence and control (see Hale, 1996; Killias, 1990; Gabriel and Greve, 2003; Jackson, 2009, 2011; Farrall et al., 2009). For example, Warr (1987) examined the relationships between perceived likelihood, 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, i.e. one’s “sensitivity to risk”, 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. 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 thus mediate the association between markers of vulnerability (typically socio-demographic variables, such as gender and age) and expressed emotion. For example, Jackson (2009) found that females tended to worry more frequently than males partly because (a) they feel less able to physically defend themselves, (b) they have lower perceived self-efficacy, (c) they have higher perceived negative impact, and (d) they see the likelihood of victimisation as higher for themselves and for their social group. The notion of perceived vulnerability has obvious implications for the “rationality debate” that has marked criminological inquiry. On the one hand, any mismatch between fear of crime and actual crime rates (typically where 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 includes notions of likelihood, control and consequence, then one is faced with the complex task to determine what exactly constitutes a match. One has to calculate not just the probability of victimisation, but also some sense of the “objective” controllability of crime and its consequences for a given individual in a given context. If one does believes 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 over the risk of crime, and that the consequences are not as bad as they fear. So “fear” is complex and multi-faceted. What about “crime”? Thus far we have argued that “fear of crime” describes a general phenomenon using common or everyday language, but that 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, behaviour; and C, cognition) related to subjective threat of victimization – brings some much needed clarity. 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 neighbourhood 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. For example, studies of people’s perceptions of neighbourhood disorder and social cohesion suggest that fear of crime is partly about how people perceive and respond to particular environments and situations. Neighbourhood disorder refers to a range of subtle (and not-so-subtle) cues in the social and physical environment, which include graffiti, broken4

windows and young people “hanging around” in public space. 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 behaviour in public space, and personal risk and threat. But what constitutes disorder is partly in the eye of the observer. According to Sampson (2009: 12), when people judge disorder as a problem they combine “…uncertain evidence with prior beliefs underwritten by cultural stereotypes.” Sampson and Raudenbush (2004) found that signifiers of disorder and incivil behaviour were viewed as especially problematic by residents of Chicago who lived in particular neighbourhoods. 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. On this note, we finish with just one among a number of promising lines of future enquiry. We hope that future research will explore whether fear of crime involves important social psychological mechanisms of stereotyping and identity. We know from psychology that emotions can have powerful effects on social cognition and motivated attention. By projecting threat, deviance and hostile intent onto certain collections of people or behaviours, a disorderly element may be one that signals to the observer what Body-Gendrot (2009: 67) calls: “an adversarial social assimilation, a desire not to conform to the social norms of the ‘law-abiders’.” For example, 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: 24-29). The identification of dangerous individuals may also operate to establish “immoral communities.” 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. References Berenbaum, H. (2010). “An initiation-termination two phase 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. and 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. and Gray, E. (2009). Social Order and the Fear of Crime in Contemporary Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Studies in Criminology. Ferraro, K. F. (1995). Fear of Crime. Interpreting Victimization Risk. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gabriel, U. and Greve, W. (2003). “The Psychology of Fear of Crime. Conceptual and Methodological Perspectives”, British Journal of Criminology, 43: 600-614. Gray, E., Jackson, J. and 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. and Gray, E. (2010). “Functional Fear and Public Insecurities about Crime”, British Journal of Criminology, 50(1): 1-22. 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. 5

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. and Reede, M.D. (1988). “Fear of Crime and Constrained Behaviour: 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., and Bolton, A. (2012). “Routine Activities and Fear of Crime: Specifying Individuallevel Mechanisms”, European Journal of Criminology, 9(2): 99-119. Robinson, M.D. and 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. and Clore, G.L. (2002b). “Episodic and Semantic Knowledge in Emotional SelfReport: Evidence for Two Judgment Processes”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(1): 198–215. Sampson, R. J. and Raudenbush, S.W. (2004). “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows’ ”, Social Psychology Quarterly, 67: 319-342. Sampson, R. J. (2009). “Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: Social Disorder Revisited”, British Journal of Sociology, 601:1-31. Sutton, R. M. and 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. and 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 Publishing. 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.

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