Thinking about fear:Findings from the ‘Experience and Expression in the Fear of Crime’ project

Talk given at Manning Gottlieb OMD, March 2007

Dr Jonathan Jackson (LSE), Dr Stephen Farrall (University of Keele), Ms Emily Gray (University of Keele)

Funded by UK Economic & Social Research Council Award No. RES000231108

Outline Basic issues in the fear of crime

Trends over time Functional fear Everyday experience & generalised anxiety

Drivers of fear Risk perception Mass media and interpersonal communication Perceptions of social order, cohesion and people Personal experience Feedback

Findings from the Experience and Expression project

Trends over time

We often read that fear of crime is increasingBut is this true?

If we have a commitment to evidence, what evidence might we draw upon?

For more than 2 decades, the British Crime Survey has asked respondents:

• ‘How worried are you about becoming a victim of . . . burglary/mugging/car crime?’

Trends over time: Evidence from the BCS

Trends over time: Evidence from the BCS

‘Functional fear’

Psychologists have long recognised that worry can be a problem-solving activity as well as a chronic and unhelpful activity.

A study has found that 25% of those who reported being ‘very worried’ about falling victim of crime, also did not feel that fear of crime or their precautions against crime affected their quality of life.

Many of these individuals took precautions and felt better because of taking these precautions;

Being ‘worried’ meant being careful. Is this adaptational?

‘Functional fear’

That was a small-scale study Consider data from the 05/06 British Crime

Survey:How worried are you about being a victim of crime * quality of life affected by fear of

crime subgroups Crosstabulation

% within How worried are you about being a victim of crime

46.2% 35.6% 18.2% 100.0%55.8% 37.4% 6.8% 100.0%82.5% 15.9% 1.5% 100.0%91.5% 6.7% 1.8% 100.0%

100.0% 100.0%73.4% 22.3% 4.3% 100.0%

Very worriedFairly worriedNot very worriedNot at all worriedRefusal, No answer

How worriedare you aboutbeing a victimof crime

Total

Minimal Moderate Great

quality of life affected by fear of crimesubgroups

Total

The everyday experience of worry about crime

Moreover, 35% of the 03/04 British Crime Survey reported being ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ worried about being mugged or robbed

Leaving aside the issue of ‘functional fear’, how should we interpret this finding?Does one-third of the population go about their

day regularly feeling worried?

Analysis of the same dataset showed that 60% of those who said they were ‘very worried’ had not actually worried once over the past year

Let us leave aside conceptual issues

Let us look at the evidence on the drivers of fear:

Risk perception

Mass media and interpersonal communication

Perceptions of social order, cohesion and people

Personal experience

Feedback

Drivers of fear: Risk perception

People worry about an event when they have formed particular representations of that event (although we need more research on these issues): It is likely (the most important) One can imagine it happening (the second most

important) It has consequences and resonance It is uncontrollable

Perhaps people are attuned to risks of a peculiarly social nature: The ‘how dare they’ factor Strikes at the heart of social organisation

Drivers of fear: Media & communication

Very difficult to research . . .

however, people must to a certain degree get their sense of the crime problem and images of criminal victimization from the mass media and interpersonal communication

Evidence is mixed, perhaps partly because of the difficulty of teasing out media consumption, how people interact with media messages, and the direction of causation

Drivers of fear: Media & communication A plural set of media may amplify or attenuate risks if

they resonate with public feelings and mood – if the symbols and representations deployed capture existing public concerns and frames of reference

Issues are more likely to receive media attention if they can be easily integrated into a narrative that motivates interlinked processes:

• Connecting: links are made between new events and already familiar instances and narratives, providing a readily available frame in which to understand novel phenomena.

• Contextualising: links are made to more abstract but still resonant contemporary issues.

• Anchoring: the imagery and connotations of an event are placed within popular anxieties and fears.

Drivers of fear: Media & communication

Circulating images of crime Scapegoating: how media talk about a social problem and present a

social group as an embodiment of that problem

Individuals may also pick up from media and interpersonal communication circulating images of the event, the perpetrators, victims and motive – namely, particular images of the risk event

• ‘Stimulus similarity’ (Winkel and Vrij, 1990): if the reader of a newspaper, for example, identifies with the described victim, or feels that their own neighbourhood bears resemblance to the one described, then the image of risk may be taken up and personalised

• Stapel et al. (1994) found subjects who received car crash information and who shared social identity with the victims provided elevates estimates of risk compared to those who had no basis for assumed similarity

Drivers of fear: Social perception

Risk perceptions are shaped by the presence of signifiers of crime in the environment: individuals, incivilities, community conditions

Perceptions of social cohesion, trust and informal social control

‘Broken windows’ and incivility

Interpretations of the values, norms and morals of the people who make up the community

Drivers of fear: Personal experience

Mixed results on effect of direct experience

However, the BCS only asks about the last yearVictimisation is more strongly related to the

frequency of fear rather than standard indicators

Stronger effects of indirect experience

Again, may depend on ‘atimulus similarity’

Drivers of fear: Personal experience

One can also compare risk rates to relative fear levels

-1-.5

0.5

Leve

l of w

orry

20 40 60 80 100Age

Men: Women:Personal crime Personal crimeBurglary BurglaryCar crime Car crime

Drivers of fear: Feedback

Emotion can influence risk perception Worriers can be:

• preoccupied with negative information and future unpleasant outcomes,

• hyper-vigilant in scanning for salient material relating to threat, • see ambiguous events as threatening, • and over-estimate risk

Emotion can influence environmental perception

High levels of anxiety can lead individuals to attend to threat-related stimuli in the environment, increase the tendency to regard ambiguous stimuli as threatening, and retrieve threat-related information from memory more readily

Our ESRC project

Finding that there are two ‘streams of fear’: Everyday worry (more strongly related to victimisation

and crime levels) More generalised anxiety (people say they are worried,

but have not actually worried recently, so they rarely find themselves in threatening situations)

Therefore, fear of crime is not reducible to concrete mental events

It also involves mental states (diffuse anxiety) and condenses a range of social concerns

Distribution of anxiety

The people who are anxious but do not actually worry appear to be …

… amongst the better off in society, home-owners, living in areas with high rates of professional employees, living in ethnically ‘white’ neighbourhoods, living in areas with low levels of disorder and low levels of deprivation.

… more victimised than the UNWORRIED, but less victimised than the WORRIED.

… a socially and criminologically ‘middling sort’?

Some Possible Explanations?

Middle class ‘fear of falling’? (Ehrenreich, 1989, Taylor & Jamison, 1999).

Anxiety about wider social change? (Girling et al, 2000).

The creation of ‘fearing subjects’? (Lee, 2001).

Intrusion of crime into middle class life? (Garland, 2001).

The next step: modelling the processes

Perceived likelihood of

mugging

11%

Knowing victim of mugging

Perception of social

cohesion and control

Perception of disorder

.05*

Experential fear:

mugging

13%

.26*

IMD: crime levels

ACORN: changes in

area

12%

8%

.24*

.25*

.09*

.17*

.07*

Victim of mugging

Expressive fear:

mugging

16%

.27*

.21*

.10*

.07*.28*

.06*.06* .13*

.09* .05*

01% 00%

.02

Modelling the processes: early results

Levels of crime and broader social changes predict public perceptions of disorder and social cohesion/collective efficacy

Signs of disorder signal to observers a danger to social cohesion

Both disorder and cohesion shapes perceived risk

Both types of ‘fear of crime’ are shaped by perceived risk and concerns about order/cohesion

However, the frequency of fear is also correlated with victimisation and knowing a victim

Modelling the processes: early results

Therefore, both types of fear express how people make sense of their local environment Both types of fear are ‘lay seismographs of social

cohesion and moral consensus’

In expressive fear, worry about crime is a way of expressing a generalised sense of risk and concern about community breakdown

In experential fear, worry about crime is the same, but it also manifests in everyday ‘spikes’ of emotion, partly because these people live at the ‘sharp end of life’