Fear, Social Interactions, and Violence Mitigation

Abstract

The fear of crime is generally considered as a social ill that undermines dimensions of individual well-being. Prior research generally specifies the fear of crime as an outcome variable in order to understand its complex etiology. More recently, however, researchers have suggested fear has a deterrence function whereby it reduces individuals’ involvement in violent encounters. This notion could hold important clues to understand the social sources of violence. We examine whether the fear of crime inhibits involvement in violent encounters, both as offender or victim, and if adjustments in routine activities explain these effects. The results suggest fear of crime reduces violence involvement, in part, by constraining routine activities. We conclude that the fear of crime appears to be a mechanism of violence mitigation that, paradoxically, bolsters physical well-being. The results are discussed with regard to their implications for criminological theory and research on interpersonal violence.

Keywords:

• fear of crime
• violence
• criminological theory
• victimization

Funding

This research was funded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Award No. 2003-JN-FX-0003 (October 2003–June 2009). Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice. Portions of this research were presented at the 2012 Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology in Chicago, IL.

Notes

¹ Throughout the paper we use the general phrases “fear of crime” and “fear of victimization” interchangeably, as both terms are used in the research literature.

² As a comparison, research by Lerner and Keltner (2001) suggests that anger produces the opposite appraisal structure as fear, whereby persons who rate high on dispositional anger tend to believe they can control situations and are more certain of the outcome. In this way, anger led people to be optimistic about risk perceptions, while fearful individuals held pessimistic views with regard to risks.

³ Note that we are unable to explicitly test the situational components of the direct effects of fear because we lack information on the situational dynamics of the violent encounters reported by respondents. For example, we cannot ascertain whether more fearful individuals flee from situations where they have been challenged to a fight.

⁴ Consistent with prior panel studies (Esbensen, Miller, Taylor, He, & Freng, 1999; Thornberry, Bjerregaard, & Miles, 1993), attrition analyses found that those youth who dropped out of the study were more delinquent than those who remained. Also, fear of victimization was significantly negatively associated with attrition. Victimization was unrelated to attrition.

⁵ The “Other” category consists of those reporting racial/ethnic backgrounds as Native American/American Indian, Asian/Pacific Islander, and others that wrote in their racial heritage.

⁶ Full information related to items included in the scales, as well as scale properties, are available upon request.

⁷ While our respondents were sampled within schools (n = 15), the school level was not included in our final analyses given the negligible variance to be explained at this level. Specifically, unconditional IRT models incorporating the school level revealed that 2.6% of the variance in overall violence and 1.7% of the total variance in the odds of being an offender in such instances was between schools. The addition of covariates at the individual level introduced complications in model convergence, made it impossible to identify covariance components, with level four variance estimates equal to .00012. The school-level, therefore, is not presented in the final models.

⁸ Reliability estimates for violent encounters (Level 1 α = .54; Level 2 α = .61) and the propensity for being an offender or victim in such instances (Level 1 α = .41; Level 2 α = .21) are low in magnitude. Low reliability estimates can be expected given the infrequent occurrence of multiple violent offenses and victimizations for youth in the sample, and due to the low number of observations within persons. According to Osgood and Schreck (2007), this method for detecting systematic role differentiation, however, is able to account for this limited reliability.

⁹ We wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Melde

Chris Melde is an associate professor and coordinator of undergraduate studies in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His primary research interests include program evaluation, juvenile delinquency and victimization, gangs, perceptions of crime and victimization risk, and criminological theory. His recent work has appeared in such outlets as Criminology, Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

Mark T. Berg

Mark T. Berg is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa, and the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. His research interests include the etiology and consequences of victimization, interpersonal violence, and the neighborhood context of antisocial behavior.

Finn-Aage Esbensen

Finn-Aage Esbensen is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Youth Crime and Violence and also serves as Chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.