Perceptually Contemporaneous Offenses: Explaining the Sex-Fear Paradox and the Crimes that Drive Male and Female Fear

Abstract

Scholars have long noted a sex-fear of crime paradox, where women, who generally have lower victimization risk, have much higher fear of crime than men. One explanation for these differences is perceptually contemporaneous offenses (Warr 1984) that link fear of one crime, like sexual assault, to a variety of perceptually related crimes. When fear of rape is included in fear models the sex-gap is generally reduced. Recent work in the area, that involved disaggregating samples by sex, has found that the notion of perceptually contemporaneous offenses may apply to men as well as women. Few studies have combined these related lines of inquiry and tested fear of rape and fear of assault in the same model. This article will use data from a 2010 Internet survey to test whether “fear of rape” or “fear of assault” better explain the sex-gap between male and female fear levels, and which crimes serve as “master offenses” for men and women.

Notes

¹An examination of the distribution of the education variable shows that 43% of the sample falls in the “some college” category. Although many of these may be current students it is also possible that many of these individuals attended college at one time and are not currently attending college. Additionally, over 57% of the respondents (less than high school, high school diploma or GED, AA, BA, graduate degree or more) fall into a category where they would be unlikely to be currently attending school. Taken together, this provides evidence that this is not a typical sample of college students.

²All data was entered directly into Survey Monkey by the respondents who utilized an online survey.

³Each of the students in four research methods courses were initially co-investigators on the study and the survey went through the IRB process at their university. Each student used the survey results for their class projects and a couple of the students also used the data to present at conferences. The respondents were not offered any compensation for their participation in the study.

⁴It should be noted that in the past 10 years several alternate measures of fear of crime have been suggested, which include worry about crime, as well as measures of intensity and frequency of crime fear/worry (Farrall and Gadd 2004, Gray et al. 2008). Validity tests of these measures indicate that more traditional fear measures, such as the ones in this study, tend to overestimate fear levels (Farrall and Gadd 2004, Gray, Jackson, and Farrall 2008). Additionally, researchers are beginning to use measures of the three dimensions of vulnerability in their fear models (Killias and Clerici 2000; Jackson 2005, 2009).

⁵It is also possible that it is not the amount of protective measures that one uses, but the type of protective measures that one uses that influences fear of crime. Alternatively, because men and women may be socialized to use protective measures differently, a sex-protective measure interaction is a possibility. These possibilities should be explored in further detail in future research.

⁶The authors would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this alternative analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Ugwu

Joseph Ugwu is a PhD student at Prairie View A&M University in Texas. He received a Master of Laws degree from University of Houston Law Center, and MS in Criminal Justice from University of Houston, Downtown. His research interests include comparative law and criminal justice, fear of crime, and crimes against children.

Sarah Britto

Sarah Britto received her PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Florida State University. Her research includes work in public perceptions of crime and punishment, gender and race issues, and restorative justice.