Gender, fear of crime, and self-presentation: an experimental investigation

Abstract

The authors investigate gendered norms associated with the fear of crime. A sample of 100 men and women in a British market town completed a fear of crime survey having been instructed either to be ‘totally honest and accurate’, or to respond in a way that portrays them ‘in the best possible light’ (‘fake good’). Men asked to ‘fake good’ reported less fear than men asked to respond honestly. This result is consistent with theories of masculinity that emphasize the importance of emotional invulnerability and self-sufficiency. In contrast, women asked to ‘fake good’ tended to report more fear than those asked to respond honestly. This result extends theories of how fear of crime curtails women's freedoms. Specifically, the fear of crime may be a prescriptive gendered norm in its own right, causing women (and men) to feel that their expressed fear is a yardstick by which they might be judged.

Keywords:

• fear of crime
• gender
• self-presentation
• social control
• social desirability

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Leigh McClellan and two anonymous reviewers for insightful and helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

1. The reader will note that consistent with previous investigations, the mean fear of crime reported by participants is below mid-point in all cells of the experimental design (see Sutton & Farrall, 2008). Indeed, all 25 men in the ‘fake good’ condition reported little or no fear (1 on a 1–5 scale) for three items – thinking about sexual assault, being afraid of sexual assault, and being afraid to go out into their neighbourhood during the day (so, the mean for these items was 1.00). These findings are also largely consistent with very low means for these items among men in previous investigations (e.g. Warr & Stafford, 1983: for a review see Hale, 1996). We think that the invariance may be due to the fact that the market town of Leek may be perceived by its residents as a generally safe place to live, keeping means rather low, and that further, the ‘fake good’ instruction encouraged men to withhold their already low-level fears.