A psychological perspective on vulnerability in the fear of crime

Abstract

This paper examines vulnerability and risk perception in the fear of crime. Past studies have often treated gender and age as proxies for vulnerability, and on the few occasions that vulnerability has been operationalized, there has been little agreement on the mechanisms that underpin perceived susceptibility. To develop a more theoretically-driven approach, the current study examines whether markers of vulnerability are associated with higher levels of fear through mediating assessments of likelihood, control and consequence. Females are found to worry more frequently than males partly because (a) they feel less able to physically defend themselves, (b) they have lower perceived self-efficacy, (c) they have higher perceived negative impact, and (d) they see the likelihood of victimization as higher for themselves and for their social group. Younger people are also found to worry more frequently than older people, but differential vulnerability does not explain this association. Finally, structural equation modelling shows that the effects on worry of physical defence capabilities, self-efficacy and perceived consequence are mostly mediated through judgements of absolute and relative risk. Conclusions focus on the implications of this finding for debates about the rationality of the fear of crime.

Keywords:

• fear of crime
• vulnerable adults
• risk assessment
• risk communication
• gender differences

Notes

1. In addition to this, recent criminological debate has also focused on feedback loops where politicians, media and research contribute to a culture of fear, leading individuals to (a) view the world more and more through the lens of crime, security and safety, and (b) demand more and more punitive policy from Government (Furedi, 2006; Lee, 2007, 2001, 1999; Simon, 2007; Zedner, 2003). Other debates have considered the importance of making sense of individual biographies when exploring the fear of crime (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997) and the refinement of the measurement of fear of crime (Farrall et al., 1997; Farrall & Gadd, 2004; Gray et al., 2008a,b; Jackson, 2005; Miller, 2008; Sutton & Farrall, 2005, 2008). For recent broad-brush summaries of debates on fear of crime, see Lee (2007), Farrall et al. (2007), Lee and Farrall (2008) and Walklate and Mythen (2008).

2. Two alternative perspectives on rationality in the fear of crime are of note. First, Richard Sparks and colleagues have argued that the narrow focus on the relationship between crime and fear has drawn attention away from the more intriguing nature of public sensibilities to crime. Not only is it difficult to fashion a yardstick that measures what level of fear is ‘rational’ according to what level of objective risk (Sparks, 1992). Rationality debates obviate an analysis of the broader social and cultural significance of crime, social order and change (Girling et al., 2000) and the relations between ‘people's fears, feelings and dispositions towards crime and punishment and the shifting political cultures in which they reside’ (Hope & Sparks, 2000, p. 3). Second, Stephen Farrall and colleagues have suggested that standard measures of the fear of crime in fact elide two ‘dimensions’ of fear: (a) everyday moments of worry; and (b) some more diffuse or ‘ambient’ anxiety about risk. Existing measures of worry about crime – such as those fielded by the British Crime Survey series – regularly show between 30% and 50% of the population of England and Wales express some kind of worry about being robbed, burgled or falling victim of some other crime (e.g. Nicholas et al., 2007). However when one probes respondents further one finds that the number of individuals who worry on an everyday basis is actually quite a bit smaller (Farrall & Gadd, 2004; Farrall et al., 1997; Gray et al., 2008a). Moreover everyday worry about crime is relatively strongly associated with levels of crime and victimization experience and is a greater drain on people's quality of life than more ambient insecurities (Jackson et al., 2007).

3. Gordon and Riger (1989) argue that men and women think about personal safety in different ways. This could be down to differing processes of socialization, particularly regarding sexual vulnerability (Hanmer & Saunders, 1984), with Stanko (1995, p. 50) arguing that sexual violence is a ‘core component of being female and is experienced through a wide range of everyday, mundane situations’. Hollander (2001, p. 84) develops this perspective with the assertion that vulnerability to violence is also a core part of being female and dangerous is a core part of being male – ‘these ideas are pervasive, widely shared, and constructed through interaction: through routine patterns of behaviour and communication that replicate and reinforce existing ideas about gender’.

4. Perloff (1983) suggested that ‘perceived unique invulnerability’ might be negative, either leading us to take fewer precautions than is prudent, or making us less able to cope with the impact of victimization (it might be more difficult to adjust to unexpected, unforeseen or unpredictable events, and the sudden loss of exaggerated control). Victimization then might lead either to ‘unique vulnerability’ (seeing oneself as highly vulnerable and others as less vulnerability) or ‘universal vulnerability’ (seeing oneself and others as equally vulnerable). She also suggested that ‘unique vulnerability’ is associated with ‘greater anxiety and depression, lower self-esteem, and a more negative self-image [compared to] university vulnerability’ (p. 53).

5. The findings suggested that when people compared themselves to vague targets, they tended to judge their risk to be lower than average. But when people compared themselves to specific comparison targets, they tended to judge their risk to be similar. Given the opportunity, individuals often made comparisons with vague targets who were seen as especially vulnerable.

6. Adding to the general confusion about the definition of vulnerability however, other studies by Winkel and colleagues have defined vulnerability as perceptions of the likelihood of victimization, while also at the same time measuring ‘negative impact’ (or perceived consequence, see Denkers & Winkel, 1998b) and ‘comparative vulnerability’ via the comparison of one's own chances of victimization compared to others chances (Winkel et al., 2003).

7. This is redolent of work that suggests that an environment seen to be unpredictable, unfamiliar and beyond the control of oneself or one's community may thus generate a sense of disquiet and an instinctive need to scan the environment for signs of trouble – a sense that ‘… anything could happen’ (Warr, 1990; Carvalho & Lewis, 2003).

8. One study has addressed public perceptions of likelihood, consequence and control in the fear of crime, but it has done so in a rather unhelpful fashion. Cates et al. (2003, p. 228) defined fear of crime ‘… as a set of beliefs or attitudes’ and examined whether criminal victimization was related to each of: (a) the severity of threat (measured by asking individuals how much they agree or disagree with statements such as ‘It is common these days to be tormented by others’, ‘Too many people today will steal if they see a way without getting caught’, and ‘Today, kids tear up property with no thought at all’); (b) the probability of occurrence (measured by asking individuals how much they agree or disagree with statements such as ‘I am scared that someone may rob me’, ‘I sometimes fear for my life’, and ‘I worry that someone might “stalk” me’); (c) the response efficacy (measured by asking individuals how much they agree or disagree with statements such as ‘Women need to carry “mace” or pepper spray’, ‘The police in our area keep vandalism down’, and ‘The courts are doing a good job of keeping the streets safe’); and (d) the self-efficacy (measured by asking individuals how much they agree or disagree with statements such as ‘If I saw a robber leave a store, I would try to get a good look at him for the police’, ‘I would rush to help someone who was being attacked’, ‘There is little that I can do to protect myself – it's really up to the police’). First, these are somewhat idiosyncratic measures of these constructs (to put it mildly), mixing up many things in an unstructured and loose way. For example, might measuring the perceived probability of victimization by asking individuals whether they are scared that they might be robbed confuse cognitive assessments of likelihood with emotional appraisals of the same risk? Second, the analysis focuses only on the association between criminal victimization and each of these four ‘beliefs or attitudes’: Cates et al. (2003) did not address how different aspects of risk perception inter-relate and coalesce to predict some emotional response.

9. It is interesting that Greve (2004, pp. 170–171) argues that: ‘If fear of crime is not experienced frequently or easily, it cannot be regarded as dispositional fear … [since] a dispositional fear of crime should be apparent in at least the frequency of fear episodes.’ (emphasis in original)

10. See Jackson (2008) for thoughts on other issues, including vividness/availability and morality/outrage.

11. These crime categories were expected to cluster within two domains: personal crime in public space and burglary. These form two distinct (but correlating) latent constructs interpreted as worry (to take worry as an example) about crime in public space and worry about property crime. This follows the idea that individuals do not distinguish between offence categories when they are appraising the danger of a particular type of victimization, but rather have a more general sense of possibility.

12. Asking about the past frequency of worry may be the most precise way of measuring the everyday experience of the fear of crime (Farrall & Gadd, 2004; Gray et al., 2008a). By contrast to standard measures – which typically ask individuals how safe they feel walking alone in their area after dark, or how worried they are overall about falling victim of different crimes – these indicators focus on actual events of emotion. They are also more highly correlated (compared to standard measures) with the self-reported impact of crime on people's own quality of life (Jackson et al., 2007).

13. Please contact the author for the full statistical results.

14. It may be that the frequency measure of worry used in this study is less susceptible to these self-presentation biases than the standard measures investigated by Sutton and colleagues (‘How worried are you …?’). In Robinson and Clore's (2002a,b) presentation of a range of problems in emotional self-report, they suggest that some people report identity-related beliefs when answering questions about their everyday emotions. Applying this to standard measures of fear of crime (‘How worried are you …?’), men may be more reluctant because it is may not be part of their male identity to admit vulnerability. However, frequency measures on the other hand, may be less likely to tap into identity-related beliefs, because they direct respondent attention onto actual experiential knowledge (i.e. actual episodes of worry).