Introduction

1. An overview of the field

The fear of crime is a creature of the last 30 years of the twentieth century. Its birth was, perhaps surprisingly, partly serendipitous, partly Machiavellian. Serendipitous, as it was essentially the by-product of attempts in the late 1960s in America to improve crime-counting. Yet disillusion with the ability of the national Uniform Crime Reports to provide an accurate measure of the amount of crime in America was only one of many reasons which led to the establishment of a Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice by President Johnson in July, 1965. As part of its enquiry, the Commission organised three crime surveys (Biderman, 1967; Ennis, 1967 and Reiss, 1967. See Sparks, 1981, and Lewis & Salem, 1986 for reflective commentary on these three surveys). The main goal of all three was to count unrecorded victimisation, but all three also included novel questions relating to the degree of public alarm about crime in general. The main report of the Commission (President's Commission, 1967: 49) later commented:

A chief reason that this Commission was organised was that there is widespread public anxiety about crime. In one sense, this entire report is an effort to focus that anxiety on the central problems of crime and criminal justice. A necessary part of that effort has been to study as carefully as possible the anxiety itself. The Commission has tried to find out precisely what aspects of crime Americans are anxious about, whether their anxiety is a realistic response to actual danger, how anxiety affects the daily life of Americans, what actions against crime by the criminal justice system and the government as a whole might best allay public anxiety.

Where had this anxiety come from? Here, things become distinctly murky, if not downright Machiavellian. Lewis & Salem (1986:3) comment on the background, rather coyly, thus:

By the late 1960s, the soaring crime rate and the ghetto riots turned the attention of policymakers away from the criminal and towards the victim. The so-called backlash, reflected in public anger at the infusion of funds into the Black community and at the concern with the rights of the criminal rather than those of the victim, led to an interest in alternative approaches to the crime prevention problem that would give primary consideration to the behaviour of those who are threatened by criminal activity.

Fair enough. But in digging deeper, and in particular in Richard Harris' remarkable - but little read - book (Harris, 1969), what we now rather blandly refer to as the fear of crime began life as the fear of blacks. Harris's account could be dismissed were it not for the fact that his book contains a highly favourable Introduction by Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, previously chairman of the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. The book is of great interest, not least as, apart from the title, the fear of crime is only mentioned on one page within it. Instead, it chronicles the extraordinary American Senatorial shennanigans which preceded the passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act on the 6th June, 1968 - a bill that Harris (ibid.:14) refers to as "a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria". Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that, sponsored by Senator McClellan, the Act was designed to reassert the rights of the white and powerful over the new rights of the poor and black which had then recently been imposed by Mallory v. United States (1957), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

The Mallory decision effectively prevented the police from obtaining confessions, valid or not, by the pressure of holding suspects incommunicado and questioning them intensively and at inordinate length. Gideon stipulated that if a defendant in a criminal case could not afford a lawyer the state had to provide one. Escobedo that when a police investigation switched from the exploratory to the accusatory, a suspect had to be allowed to consult a lawyer. And Miranda that a suspect in custody must be warned prior to any questioning that he has the right to remain silent.

So, the "public alarm" about crime emerged, via the manipulation of the Nixonian silent majority, from right wing white concern about the extension of rights to the poor and the black. Indeed, in our first selection (Chapter One), and one of the very first academic articles on the subject, Frank Furstenberg comments (1971:601) "fear of crime is the symptom of the silent majority's lashing back". In an admirably clear statement, Furstenberg elucidates the findings from the Presidential Commission, and presents some of the paradoxes that have become the staple diet of fear of crime research: that anxiety about crime is not always commensurate with the risk of victimisation (with fear, ironically, being the most intense among inner-city low-income blacks); and that those least in danger are the most afraid. Curiously, at this point, age and gender could be dismissed as having "no sizeable or consistent effect" on fear of crime (ibid.:607).

Chapter One illustrates where fear of crime first appeared as an academic problem, and retains some of its history: the silent majority "lashing back", and fear of crime described as "at least in part an expression of resentment of changing social conditions, especially efforts to eliminate racial injustice" (ibid.: 606). In Chapter Two, Richard Block shows just how far we have come since then. A model of international comparative sophistication, Block's article illustrates the huge methodological and colonial strides that have been taken since the late 1960s, and also, but covertly, how the fear of crime has gradually been transformed from being a reason for conducting criminological enquiry into being the object of that enquiry, and from being a national concern about crime into a local fear of victimisation. In sum, gradually over that 30 year period, general - if bigoted - societal concern about crime has been transmuted into a personal problem of individual vulnerability.

2. The causes of vulnerability

Over that period, gender has emerged as probably the biggest single demographic factor related positively to fear of crime. Chapter Three, by Carol Brooks Gardner, is only one of many possible candidates, but was chosen as it was published originally more or less at the high point of dominance of the fear of crime literature by feminist issues. Since then, women's fear of crime has been described as stemming from heightened social and physical and social vulnerability (Skogan & Maxfield, 1981), from fear of rape (Warr, 1985), from general fear of men (Stanko, 1997), from fear for their families (Mesch & Fishman, 1998), or from irrationality (Hanmer & Saunders, 1984). Those wishing to catch up on gender related enquiry published since then should consult Rachel Pain's exceptional contributions (Pain, 1995, 1995a, 1997, 1997a).

Chapter Four, by Jo Goodey, acts both as part of the explanation of women's fears, and as a bridge between the concern with gender and the concern with the perhaps second most significant other variable - age. Goodey's respondents are children: with their experiences being the crucible within which the stereotypes of fearless males and fearful females are forged. But it is the elderly, rather than the young, that are most commonly associated with crime fearfulness, and the apparent paradox that this presents (the elderly are least likely to be victims of the types of crimes they allegedly fear) has led many to overstate the effect of age on fear of crime.

Chapter Five, by Randy LaGrange and Kenneth Ferraro reassesses the impact of age on fear of crime, and concludes that the effect of age is not only overestimated, but also misplaced. The elderly, they claim, are no more afraid of crime than anybody else when it is measured concretely, but they are somewhat more fearful of, or more anxious about crime when it is expressed as a general, "formless" fear. Typically, older people adopt lifestyles that protect themselves from risk (Tulloch, et al., 1999). Because of LaGrange and Ferraro's pioneering work, it is now becoming more fashionable to challenge, rather than celebrate the relationship between age and the fear of crime: a trend epitomised, perhaps, by Werner Greve's work (Greve, 1998).

In Chapter Six, Gertrude Moeller tackles one of the most curiously understated and yet most paradoxical correlates of fear of crime: race. Although, as we have shown, fear of crime began life as a polite code for fear of black people, the first crime surveys consistently found that black people were more anxious about crime than were whites (eg, Biderman, op cit., p. 127). Since the early studies, Liska et al. (1982) found that racial segregation was related directly to low levels of white crime fear, Stinchcombe et al. (1980) that white crime fear was related to both proximity to black people and to racial prejudice. Later reviews of the field, particularly by Skogan (1995), have reassessed these contributions, and conclude that blacks are more likely to be fearful and that there are probably good reasons for this (in America, anyway, they are more likely to be victimised, and more likely to live in neighbourhoods where serious crime is more frequent). Further, among whites, residential proximity to black people is related to their fear of crime, and racial prejudice and fear of crime are related in ways independent of the proximity of whites to black people.

In a perhaps surprising piece of work, Oscar Newman and Karen Franck, in Chapter Seven, show that residential building size can also affect residents' fear of crime levels far more significantly than it affects their risk of crime. As they put it, "the larger the building, the higher the level of residents' fear".

Chapter Eight, by Wesley Skogan reviews what was once seen to be the key to understanding crime fear: prior crime victimisation. Although the paradox is frequently asserted (i.e., those most likely to be victimised are the most fearful, and vice versa), and prior victimisation a highly common-sensical positive correlate, much research has been surprisingly inconclusive about the issue. Some (eg, Ratcliffe & McCullagh, 1998) feel that the problem lies with the identification and measurement of prior victimisation (particularly repeat victimisation) and others, such as Hope (1995) that temporal and spatial conditions are crucial but rarely taken into account. Skogan, in what is a clear and authoratitive article, shows that prior victimisation affects fear related attitudes and behaviour in clear and consistent ways, although the effects on different groups are themselves, consistently different.

From its birth in the 1960s, however, general levels of crime fear have always been putatively associated with coverage of crime in the mass media. Indeed, the 1967 President's Commission commented (ibid., p. 52):

Past research on the mass media's connection with crime has concentrated primarily on depictions and accounts of violence in the mass media as possible causes of delinquency and crime. Little attention has thus far been given to what may be a far more direct and costly effect - the creation of distorted perceptions of the risk of crime and exaggerated fears of victimization.

The next selection of articles looks at the body of research which picked up this particular gauntlet.

3. The sources of information on victimisation

In the first selection here, Chapter Nine, Mary Baker, Barbara Nienstedt, Ronald Everett and Richard McCleary investigated the effects on the local population of a crime wave that affected Phoenix, Arizona during 1980. Curiously, those that the fear of crime literature would predict to be the most affected (women and the elderly) were the least so; and those that would be predicted to be least affected (well-educated whites) were the most affected. As usual then, even in early reports, common-sense expectations that there would be a single, dominant, or even non contradictory effect on fear of crime from an expected source - here, the media - fails to stand up on first examination.

Indeed, attempts thereafter to relate people's crime fear to media portrayal of crime have met with even less success than the attempts to correlate it convincingly with the alleged demographic causes of vulnerability we dealt with in the previous section. Take for example the work, successively, of George Gerbner and Larry Gross (Chapter Ten) and of Anthony Doob and Glenn Macdonald (Chapter Eleven). Gerbner and Gross established, fairly convincingly, that people generalise from the information that they get from watching television, and, specifically, that those who watch a lot of television are more likely to feel that they might become involved in some kind of violence during a given week that do those who watch relatively little television. Doob and Macdonald attempted to replicate these crucial findings in a substantial survey conducted in Toronto. Overall, they found roughly the same picture as did Gerbner and Gross. However, when they controlled for the different levels of crime in the four sub-areas of the city that they conducted their research in, the picture changed dramatically. They conclude that when the actual incidence of crime is taken into account, there is no relationship between television viewing and the fear of being a crime victim.

In Chapter Twelve, Linda Heath and John Petraitis compound the confusion. They build on the earlier contradictory findings, and test the proposition that although television viewing might not affect peoples' perceptions of crime in their immediate environment, they might affect their beliefs about more distant settings. In two separate studies, both reported in the same article, they show convincingly that this is the case: that is, that television viewing does not compete with people's perceptions of their own locale, but greatly affects their views of far away places.

Others claim that reading newspapers must have more influence because of the near monopoly that newspapers have on reporting crime news, and because it has been shown repeatedly that newspaper reporting of crime news is highly selective and distorted, often sensationally over-reporting crimes involving sex and/or violence (Ditton & Duffy, 1983). In Chapter Thirteen, Allen Liska and Willian Baccaglini produce the results of comparing the levels of crime, of reported fear of crime, and levels of newspaper reporting of crime in 26 American cities. The resulting pattern was complex: although clearest for homicide (which amounted to 0.2 percent of crimes, but 29.9 percent of crime stories) which increased people's levels of fear if they were local homicides (but only if they were reported in the first part of the newspaper), but, curiously, reduced fear if they were reports of homicides committed elsewhere.

Finally, in this section, Chapter Fourteen reproduces Paul Williams & Julie Dickinson's more recent research into the relationship between newspaper reading and the fear of crime. They found a significant positive relationship between levels of fear and the type of newspaper read which was seemingly independent of relevant demographic factors. Further, those who read newspapers which typically over-sensationalised crime news were more fearful than those who read newspapers that did not.

Research so far has only scratched the probable surface of the relationship between the fear of crime and media portrayals of it. Unhappily, an area which speculatively has the greatest likelihood of advancing our understanding of the fear of crime has been significantly under-researched.

4. The methods of surveying

That the survey has been the methodology for investigating the fear of crime to the exclusion of virtually all others is the legacy of the historical period when such research was started (the heyday of survey research). That it has remained in such a dominate position is symptomatic of the conservatism inherent within this body of research (in which old questions are endlessly recycled). However, despite this built in trait (which can surely only lead to a view of crime fears which is distorted to say the least), numerous authors have questioned the appropriateness of the survey tool as the basis for this body of research. In Chapter Fifteen, Kenneth Ferraro and Randy LaGrange - in one of the truly great articles on the subject - take issue with the main measure of fear of crime: "how safe do you or would you feel being out alone in your neighbourhood at night". They criticise it (rightly in our opinion) for failing to mention of word 'crime', for relying upon a vague geographical reference, for asking people about something they may do very rarely and for mixing the hypothetical with the real. In addition to this we would add that the use of the word 'how' at the start of the question is leading in the extreme. After reading this article is it hard to fathom why researchers have continued to employ this question so readily or how they have justified such conservatism.

That Ferraro and LaGrange's article was not published until 1987 should not be taken as evidence that the problems with measuring fear (be it of crime, wasps or mother-in-laws) were not known until then. In an article still as relevant to survey researchers today, Chapter Sixteen reprints James Croake and Dennis Hinkle's 1976 article, where they noted that "the longer the list [of fears], the greater the number of fears". A somewhat trite point but one which survey researchers would appear to have overlooked. We are reminded of our undergraduate sociology classes (respectively 20 years apart) when Herbert Gans' dictum that surveys can only report what people say they do and feel and not what a researchers has seen they say, do and feel' was drummed into us ad nauseam.

Leaving aside the issue of whether surveys offer the best source for gathering data about fear, let us turn now to consider (all too briefly) some of the more recent attempts to improve upon surveys as they are employed in the study of the fear of crime. Martin Killias, in Chapter Seventeen, discusses the improvements made to the Swiss Crime Survey by the introduction of computer assisted telephone interviewing. In Chapter Eighteen, Anne Schneider provides a very good summary of some of the main problems with survey research into victimisation - important to research on fear as victimisation has been cited as being a major mediating factor in fear levels. Other summaries of the problems of fear of crime methodologies (and suggestions for how to overcome these) can be found in Farrall, et al., 1997, Bilsky, 1993, and Fattah 1993.

5. Theoretical models of explanation

It should be said from the outset, that attempts to explain the fear of crime have met with a limited level of success (see, for example, Ralph Taylor and Margaret Hale's work in Chapter Nineteen). Chris Hale in his gargantuan review of the fear of crime literature (Hale, 1996), suggests that there are four broad dimensions to the theoretical attempts to explaining the fear of crime: vulnerability, victimisation experiences, the environment and, lastly, psychological factors. Our review here will devote greatest attention to the last of these - partly because the development of a reasonably robust social psychological model of the fear of crime is one of the most recent developments in this field, and partly because it suggests a new avenue for others to pursue.

Unlike many of the theoretical models of the fear of crime which have relied upon socio-demographic variables to account for variations in fear levels, Adri Van der Wurff, Leendert Van Staalduinen and Peter Stringer employ a social psychological model, in their work - which is here reproduced as Chapter Twenty. Their model is a carefully reasoned assessment of the processes by which fear may become realised in peoples' everyday lives. It should be noted that their model employs some of the logic derived from socio-demographic models of fear (vulnerability, stranger danger, concerns about unsupervised youths and the location of potential assaults are all to be found in their discussion of their model). Whilst their social psychological model does perform well, and out performs the socio-demographic model they test against it, as Hale (1996) notes, the socio-demographic model was missing some key variables. When Farrall et al. (1999) and Mesko & Farrall (1999) tested the same social psychological model using data collected in Scotland and Slovenia, and which employed a more complete socio-demographic model, the results were not as impressive (although were still very good). The work of Van der Wurff and his colleagues is broadly supported by the replications undertaken by Farrall and his colleagues and taken together they suggest a useful avenue for future research on the fear of crime.

The other articles collected here represent some of the key theoretical dimensions in explaining the fear of crime. Vincent Sacco and William Glackman, in Chapter Twenty One, build a model in which vulnerability is conceptualised along physical, social and psychological dimensions. Taylor and Hale, in Chapter Nineteen, propose and test three different models to account for variations in the fear of crime. Whilst all of the models fitted the data, the percentage of worry accounted for was low (no more than 12%). Ralph Taylor, Stephen Gottfredson and Sidney Brower (in Chapter Twenty Two) employ concepts developed from the work on defensible space and local social ties to account for variations in fear levels amongst housing blocks in America.

6. Policies to reduce fear

Despite differences in opinions over what provokes fear, which variables best explain its dispersion in society and which groups in society are most affected by fear, most academics and policy-makers can agree over one thing: that something should be done about it. In this section we turn our attention to the policies and programmes which have been initiated to combat fear of crime. In so doing we discover something else that (almost) everyone agrees about: that nothing can be done about it.

Patricia Allatt, in Chapter Twenty Three, reports a study which attempted to alleviate rates of burglary and rates of fear about burglary. Allatt's data comes from a classic control group-experimental group design. The project attempted to alleviate burglaries and fears about burglaries by increasing rates of household and flat security. However, it is not clear that the project was actually completed as envisaged - in that not all of the households had been secured by the end of the fieldwork phase. The evaluation suggests that whilst rates of burglary did not decline, rates of fears did decline. Trevor Bennet's article, here as Chapter Twenty Four, concludes that whilst the number of police patrols were increased, they did not appear to reduce levels of fear of crime. He concludes that the features of urban life which influence fear of crime are cannot be influenced by the police. In Chapter Twenty Five, Jeffrey Henig and Michael Maxfield review a number of the possible explanations of fear and suggest possible programmes which could counteract fear. In one of the pioneering investigations of community crime prevention, Dan Lewis and Greta Salem, in Chapter Twenty Six, explore the theoretical foundations for reducing crime by changing the behaviour of potential victims. Finally, in Chapter Twenty Seven, Gwyneth Nair, Jason Ditton and Samuel Phillips report their evaluation of a programme designed to reduce fear by massive improvements to both domestic dwellings and to the external environment. In the words of the authors the project 'failed' - that is to say that fear was not be reduced.

7. The future?

Although there has been a great deal of research into fear of crime - Hale (1996) refers to the presence of over 200 reports 4 years ago, and a recent on-line search dredged 837 entries - surprisingly little can be said conclusively about the fear of crime. Why so much labour has yielded so little is something of a mystery, but it may well be that researchers have been looking, at least partly, in the wrong direction. As a pointer to alternative approaches, the final chapter, Chapter Twenty Eight, reports some of the findings that have emerged from the most extensive research project ever conducted into the "fear" of crime in Britain. Here, Jason Ditton, Jon Bannister, Elizabeth Gilchrist and Stephen Farrall discovered that fear was not, in fact the main reaction to either the possibility or actuality of criminal victimisation - the main reaction was anger. Perhaps after 30 years or so, the initial public "alarm" about crime has distilled into public anger over political inability to actually do much about crime?

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