Social Order and the Fear of Crime in Contemporary Times

The fear of crime has been recognized as an important social problem in its own right, with a significant number of citizens in many countries concerned about crime. In this book, the authors critically review the main findings from over 35 years of research into attitudes to crime, highlighting groups who are most fearful of crime and exploring the theories used to account for that fear. Using this research, the authors move on to propose a new model for the fear of crime, arguing that such methods, which involve intensity questions (such as ‘how worried are you about x …’), may actually conflate an ‘expressive’ or ‘attitudinal’ component of the fear of crime with an experiential component and therefore fail to provide a comprehensive insight into how crime is perceived. Taking an entirely new approach to their subject, the authors use existing quantitative data from the British Crime Survey to pose theoretically informed questions to help identify those who only ‘expressively’ fear crime, separating them from those who have the actual experience of worrying about crime. By exploring the extent to which each group has different social attitudes and backgrounds, and whether there is more than one social/cultural form of the fear of crime, this innovative and exciting title promises to reposition this aspect of criminology to a more prominent place.