ANGER ABOUT CRIME -

A conveniently well kept secret?

What do we really think about crime? Actually, as research now proves, we are angry about it. But the Government tells us that we are frightened. How has this mischievous sleight of hand been dealt?

More cock-up than conspiracy, I suspect: a product of central bureaucratic rigidity and local imitative timidity rather than of an artful and deliberate con. It began only at the beginning of the 1980s, with the first British Crime Survey, but since then, being "afraid" rapidly and insidiously entrenched itself at the dominant attitude to crime.

We are all now entombed in a verbal sarcophagus of individual passive distress. The words used to monitor public attitudes to crime are "concern", "anxiety", "worry" and "fear". Subtly, the fear of crime becomes the problem, rather than crime itself. This leaves us all prey to bogus reassurance.

The central bureaucratic rigidity flows from the necessity to compare data over time. Because the Home Office asked people "how much do you worry about crime?" the first time the Crime Survey was run, people have to be asked exactly the same question on every successive occasion to compare one year with the next. This is the only way to plot trends.

Local imitative timidity, as every local crime survey asked, to be on the safe side, those same Home Office questions. Overall, too much blinkered repetition, and too little imagination.

A few years ago - having conducted a few timid local crime surveys myself - I began to think that there was something distinctly fishy about all this. Why did people apparently "fear" being a victim of precisely those crimes they were least likely to be victims of? This is one of many often discovered research generated paradoxes. More little old ladies "worry" about being mugged than anybody else does, but they are least likely to be mugged. Young men are much more likely to be mugged, but unafraid of it.

Further, why do rates of such "fear" remain stubbornly constant when real crime rates go down? And critically, why don't fear rates decline after millions of taxpayers pounds are spent trying to reduce them?

These, and many other problems suggested that it was the standard questions that were responsible for creating this quasi-real fear, and that asking them again and again, and all over the place, and having politicians parrot the cliche that fear of crime was as much of a problem as crime itself, was responsible for maintaining the fear rate at a constant level.

Another view might be this: perhaps older people are "concerned" about mugging, not for their personal safety, but because such crimes seem to be nasty? And having repeatedly said so, perhaps they are miffed because they think nothing has been done.

So in 1994 we set off to have a fresh look at the "fear" of crime. Armed with a big research budget from the ESRC, yes, but otherwise just with sheets of blank paper rather than with the usual questions, and we set out to complete detailed personal interviews rather than sterile questionnaires.

We were privileged to be given such a research blank cheque. It allowed us to just ask people to tell us, in their own words, what they thought and felt about crime. But this yielded a bewilderingly lengthy list of words.

Next, we wrote each word on a separate card, and encouraged focus groups to look at these cards, discuss the issues, and arrange the words into to cognate groups. The long and the short of it was that people were "afraid" of crime, but they were also "angry" about it.

How much of each emotion, we didn't know. The next step was a brand new questionnaire. We commissioned a huge random sample of over 1,600 adults, and asked them to tell us.

That survey was conducted in 1996, well before the current government came to power. When we got the first results, we knew they were revolutionary. We waited until they were published in international scientific journals before leaking them out.

When we first saw the early results, so wrapped up were we in the fear-of-crime myth, that they astonished us. Males or females, old or young, and whatever the type of criminal victimisation being contemplated (or suffered), more people were angry than were afraid.

We had anticipated that it would be the other way round - that people would be much more afraid than angry.

We also discovered that people who are angry are much angrier than people who are afraid, are afraid. Admittedly, people who had recently been crime victims were more afraid than those who hadn't. But those same victims were also much angrier than the non-victims.

We don't know much about the anger experienced by non-victims. To be frank, we hadn't expected this response, so we hadn't thought to ask them. But we did ask some of the recent crime victims to tell us.

A 75 year old female burglary victim felt told us that she had felt "terribly angry that they had dared to come into the house". A 34 year old woman's house had been left unlocked by her cousin. She said: "I was so angry at my cousin for being so stupid. I hope it happens to her!" A 47 year old female burglary victim was "absolutely furious with the police". A 36 year old woman who had had her bike stolen "was so annoyed, so annoyed about it".

But these are the very people (middle-aged to old women) who are supposed to be most frightened!

So why is current policy so besotted with the "fear" of crime. Seeking the origins of the idea reveals all, although the answer is ugly.

"Fear" of crime first saw the light of day in America in the 1960s: a couple of decades before it did here. The idea was first coined in 1962 or thereabouts, and had two interesting features.

One, it began as general public concern about crime in society. It wasn't about personal fear of becoming a victim.

Two, and behind the scenes, it was a rich white backlash against a series of landmark legal decisions which gave the poor and the black the right no longer to be held incommunicado for lengthy periods by the police; the right to be allowed - even provided with - a lawyer; and for those being so questioned to be warned prior to questioning that they have the right to remain silent.

In essence, it was the embryonic Nixonian "silent majority" getting their own back after the passage of the American anti-racial segregation and anti-racial discrimation laws of the early 1960s.

It is not likely that, here, the English race riots of 1980 prompted ministers to fund the first British Crime Survey in 1981. Given the American history, the question is worth asking. I, for one, would like an answer, but I know I won't get one.

Since the early 1980s, it has taken a particularly British interpretation of the survey data to transform a societal concern about crime from being a reason for conducting criminological enquiry into being the object of that enquiry. It also translated a national concern about the way society is going, into a problem of individual vulnerability. After which, it became a personal fear of local victimisation.

It is unlikely that any of this was deliberate - but it certainly has become very convenient. Why?

The major planks of the victim movement cast the victim as passive. Indeed, the charity formed to aid victims is called Victim Support. This has overtones of victim tendency to wilt which our alternative (Victim Pacification) does not. The recent substitution of survivor for victim as the term used for those who suffer other kinds of abuse came about precisely because of the supine overtones of the definition of the victim as personally fearful.

Fear is a 'seemly' reaction by the passive. Anger is not. Anger is inconsistent with the way we have chosen to define the victim role. And why do we prefer to characterise those who suffer crime as passive? Because it is expedient so to do.

Fearful victims passively and gratefully accept such support as is given, and such compensation as the state is prepared, however tardily, to provide. The angry victim is liable to vigilantism, informal punishments of the locally troublesome, and may get uppity in the face of the inefficiencies and absurdities of the criminal justice process.

Compared to the angry victim, the fearful victim is mercifully compliant.

Angry victims are the ultimate silent majority. Their real feelings, as the latest research now shows, were not discovered before, and so are not attended to in policy. It is difficult to overstate the consequences of the lack of attention given to the angry crime victim; and the over-celebration of the fearful crime victim.

But it is time to redress the balance.

For more detail, go to the RESEARCH/Fear of Crime pages