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Part 1: Read Chapter 3 on Page 28.Part 2: Review and analyze Table 3.1 on Page 32. Develop
your own table using the same format and illustrate the same
international comparisons of indicators of fear of crime for the
following countries. Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Japan, and France.
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Chapter 3
Crime and the public
Overview
• What is a crime is defined by a complex social process. Identical events may be classified as crime or
otherwise, depending on the circumstances. The decision to report events to the police as crimes is just
one important aspect of this. Government policy may lead to certain crimes being targeted for police
attention.
• There is evidence that the public appear to have a tough-minded attitude towards crime. This may affect
the administration of criminal justice, perhaps by influencing politicians to be more tough-minded on
crime.
• The public’s knowledge about aggregate rates of crime and trends in criminal statistics tends to be gen-
erally inaccurate. This is partly because it is difficult to think statistically in terms of percentages and
probabilities.
• Moral panics are essentially an overreaction to an event (such as a crime) that has been perceived as a
threat or a risk to society’s dominant values. The alarm generated may lead to demands for action to be
taken against the source of the threat. The strength of feeling tends to be self-nurturing such that the panic
escalates.
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• The media and personal experience form the basis of the public’s knowledge about crime. The links
between the two are far from simple and not apparent in all research. There is often little or no relationship
between an individual’s risk of victimisation and their level of fear of crime. This is the fear–victimisation
paradox. Understanding the psychological processes involved in the fear of crime seems to improve
predictions about media influences on the individual and the consequences of victimisation.
• Theories about the origins of the fear of crime suggest that: (1) the distorted image of crime portrayed by
the media affects heavy television viewers disproportionately (cultivation theory); (2) any source of information may provide the individual with a particularly vivid but negative impression of a particular crime or a
particular sort of crime such that the individual responds to similar situations to the vivid imagery with fear
(availability heuristic theory); and (3) fear of crime is the consequence of the independent influences of
beliefs about the negative consequences of being victimised and the subjective risk of being victimised
(cognitive theory).
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Attitudes towards crime
Introduction
Crime does not just involve criminals. It is the result of a
complex social process, which operates at virtually every
conceivable level of social and psychological analysis.
Crime is not merely (or even) the product of the mind of
the criminal; it is a social product. According to Ainsworth
(2000a), the path from the commission of a crime to the
punishment of an offender is a long, complex and tortuous
one. The factors involved include the following:
• what laws apply;
• what the set of circumstances surrounding the events is;
• what the public thinks about crime;
• what the victim thinks about crime;
• what the ethos of the policing system is;
• what the system for dealing with psychiatric cases is;
• who decides whom to prosecute;
• the rules governing court procedure;
• the skills of the lawyer;
• the characteristics of the judge;
• what the jurors have read in the newspapers about the
case;
• any one of a number of other aspects of the crime,
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the criminal and the criminal justice system. Each is
essential and, in some circumstances, any may become
crucial.
The same event can be seen quite differently according to
the prevailing circumstances. Defining when a crime has
occurred is not merely complex but can involve a multiplicity of perspectives. It may seem that from one perspective a crime has been committed, but from another
perspective a crime may not have been committed. All of
these things are dependent on the jurisdiction involved
since the practice of the law varies not only in different
parts of the world but, in some cases, in different parts of
a country. The thief who is so mentally impaired that he/
she does not know that he/she is committing a crime may
be not guilty of theft in the eyes of the court. The driver
who inadvertently drives over the speed limit because his/
her speedometer is faulty, in law may well be committing
a crime even though he/she had not intended to, simply
because this is a strict (i.e. absolute liability) offence. And
some things which are illegal today, may once have not
been subject to the law. For example, it is only in recent
years that an offence of grooming a child for sexual purposes has been created in the United Kingdom and other
parts of the world, despite it being a matter of concern for
many years. Hate crimes are also a relatively new category
of crime. Conversely, sometimes things that were illegal
cease to be so, as in the case of suicide.
Legal processes are social in nature and cannot be
understood simply in terms of knowledge of the relevant
law. Figure 3.1 shows a little of the complexity of the processes involved. A number of issues should be considered:
• The figure suggests a relatively closed criminal justice
system but this is an incomplete picture. It is a more
open system than this implies and involves the wider
social system (e.g. the media may put pressure on the
police to find the culprit).
• Legislation is the result of a political process that may
involve interest groups pressuring the government, for
example. An illustration of this would be the pressure
of feminist groups to change the laws and practices
concerning domestic violence.
• Furthermore, some actions by the police – such as
attempts to control private sexual practices that may be
illegal in a technical sense – may bring media and public condemnation.
• The figure would seem to indicate that the criminal law
is the recourse for the victim. However, there are other
remedies available, such as using the civil law to
achieve compensation. Private prosecutions of homicide suspects who have been acquitted by the criminal
courts are an example of this. Standards of evidence are
slightly less exacting in the civil law and the penalties
are also less serious – financial costs rather than imprisonment being involved.
• Single arrows operating in just one direction join the
elements of the system in Figure 3.1. In reality, each of
the elements of the system may interact with other elements. For example, if it appears to the public that there
is failure to lead to the conviction of the offender in
sufficient numbers of rape cases, victims may be
unwilling to report the crime to the police.
Attitudes towards crime
The views of the public about crime are of political importance. Governments are keen to demonstrate that they
have the right policies on crime, prison and the police, for
instance. For that reason, public attitudes may impinge on
many aspects of the criminal justice system. Public opinion is widely surveyed on matters such as satisfaction with
the police, judges and the prison system. For example, it
became increasingly common for juveniles to be processed through the same courts as adult prisoners in
Canada and the US. Research in the 1990s showed that the
Canadian public supported processing youngsters in the
same courts as adults (Sprott, 1998). Those who believed
this tended also to have a harsher attitude to the punishment of juveniles. Although the public did not create the
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Crime and the public
Figure 3.1 Stages in the process of crime described by Ainsworth
Source: After Psychology and Crime: Myths and Reality, Harlow: Longman (Ainsworth, P.B. 2000) Copyright © Pearson Education Ltd.
2000
situation in which the separate youth system of justice
increasingly became eroded in Canada, the public supported it.
Another good example is the public’s beliefs about
recidivism after leaving prison. If recidivism was infrequent, the case for, say, keeping prison terms short would
be stronger and, perhaps, attitudes towards the rehabilita-
tion of offenders might be more positive. However, the
public seems to believe that recidivism is rife and almost
the norm for many types of offence. Evidence for this
comes from a study of a range of individuals in Spain and
Canada who have good educational backgrounds and,
mostly, a close interest in criminology (Redondo, Luque
and Funes, 1996). The Spanish sample believed that, for a
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Knowledge of crime
first offender, the average likelihood of their reoffending
for drug trafficking offences was high:
Knowledge of crime
• On average, they thought that the likelihood of reoff-
People know all sorts of things about crimes they have
witnessed, as well as those they have been told about or
have read about or seen in the media. Nevertheless, the
public’s knowledge about criminal statistics suggests that
the public’s perception of rates of crime is rather inaccurate, no matter how it is measured. Feilzer (2015) reports
that since the 1950s, numerous studies in different parts of
the world have shown public knowledge of crime to be
poor. For example, the public tends to assume that crime
rates are broadly increasing despite the evidence being to
the contrary in recent years. Lord Ashcroft (2011) conducted an online survey of over 2000 people about various
things, including the crime rate in the UK. About threequarters of the public thought that the crime rate had either
risen or remained unchanged over the period 1997 to
2010. But the figures from the British Crime Survey
(Crime Survey of England and Wales) suggested that the
crime rate had actually fallen by 43 per cent during that
period. Just 2 per cent of the public had said that this was
the case (Kershaw, Nicolas and Walker, 2008; Chaplin,
Flatley and Smith, 2011).
Another example comes from a survey of students at a
British university (Ainsworth and Moss, 2000). These
ending was 61 per cent within five years. The figure
reached 100 per cent average prediction of reoffending
for multi-recidivists (i.e. individuals having offended
and been convicted many times). This contrasts with
actual rates of 11 per cent and 44 per cent for the two
types of offender in Spain. These figures are clearly
much lower than the public’s expectations.
• Similar findings were obtained for sexual offences.
Recidivism estimates ranged from 31 per cent to 54 per
cent in both the Canadian and Spanish samples for first
offenders, recidivists and multi-recidivists. In reality,
recidivism for sex offences tended to be rather low in
sex offenders in both countries.
In other words, it would seem that the public strongly
tends towards the view that once a criminal, always a
criminal. Perhaps that is why custodial sentences are
regarded favourably by many members of the public.
Apart from being of interest in their own right, the public’s
knowledge, beliefs and concerns about crime need to be
understood since they may impinge on how criminal justice is administered.
Box 3.1 Key concept
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Moral panics
The concept of moral panic has its origin in Stanley Cohen’s study of the phenomenon of youth crime in Britain in
the 1960s (Cohen, 1972, 1980). At the time, the two opposing teen gangs – Mods versus Rockers – came to the
attention of the media and the public. Clashes between the two, often at seaside towns at weekends and holiday
times, was reported in terms that, to Cohen at least, seemed out of proportion to the scale of the actual phenomenon.
There was a sense of outrage and distress, fuelled by the media, which led for calls for action against such youth
crime. Furthermore, there was a process of escalation in which the media overstated the situation and attributed to
Mods and Rockers a far greater threat than existed in real life but, at the same time, the Mods and Rockers were
attracted by the publicity and excitement that it brought. So there was a sort of spiral which fed public opinion.
A little later, Hall et al. (1978) applied the concept to an analysis of those street crimes commonly called mugging. Once again, the perceived threat was greater than the evidence of the real-life phenomenon. Nevertheless, the
public feeling was that something had to be done about mugging. This encouraged police activity in the community
which, again, could not be justified by the more objective evidence.
The term ‘moral panic’ has commonly been used to describe the circumstances in which demands for new legislation or other forms of legal action are intense. So, for example, the term has been used to describe situations in
which there is a high level of demand that action is taken against a particular form of crime or criminal: for
example, calls for legislation to deal with child sexual abuse, protests against paedophiles living in the community
and so forth. While it may be true that emotions are intense in such cases, the term ‘moral panic’ is merely descriptive of the events rather than an explanation of why interest is at such levels. Hall et al. (1978) suggested that moral
panics tend to occur when two ideologies are in conflict. For example, the emergence of the Mods and Rockers may
have been the result of traditional moral values held by adults and emerging youth cultures with different ideas
about the freedom and appropriate lifestyle of young people. It is the conflict between these two ideological positions that results in the moral panic.
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Crime and the public
students were enrolled on an undergraduate module on
crime and deviance so they might have been expected to
show more sophistication about the topic than the general
public. This proved not to be the case. The students were
asked a number of questions and were provided with a
range of answers from which to choose. These included:
Perhaps the most important thing is the public’s general
perception of the extent to which society is becoming
increasingly criminal and risky (Docherty, 1990) irrespective of the trends to be found in criminal statistics.
1. How many crimes were recorded by the (England and
Wales) police per year in the 1990s?
The nature of the fear
of crime
3 million
5 million
8 million
12 million
Only about a quarter correctly chose 5 million. There
was a tendency to overestimate.
2. What proportion of officially recorded crimes do
crimes of violence make up?
5%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
Again, about a quarter chose the correct answer, 10%.
About a half said more than the true figure.
3. What percentage of crimes result in someone being
convicted and sentenced in court?
2%
5%
10%
20%
30%
40%
Only one in ten chose the first option of 2%. In other
words, the vast majority failed to appreciate what a low
figure it is.
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It can be questioned whether one would expect the
public to know in any detail the sort of aggregate findings
which are found in criminal statistics. The general public
do not have a great interest in statistics and statistical data
in general and is likely to dismiss statistics as misleading
(Howitt, 1992, 1998b). It is likely that only specialists
would be familiar with the detail of crime statistics. Of
course, annual crime statistics sometimes feature in the
news but this is infrequent by its very nature and, given the
public’s distrust of statistical data, even those reading
about such statistics may take them with a grain of salt.
The disciplines of criminology, sociology, psychology and
politics all share an interest in the topic of the public’s fear
of crime. It is of interest to political scientists since government’s have an interest in measuring fear of crime. From
the state’s point of view, the less fear of crime, in a sense,
the better job the government is doing. Different areas may
have different levels of fear of crime which may be a
pointer to where crime is a particularly difficult problem. It
is probably easier to influence the public’s fear of crime
than the amount of crime in society. The general public
demonstrates its fear of criminal victimisation in any number of different ways. Table 3.1 illustrates some of these
indicators based on international data. The fear that one’s
home is likely to be burgled is particularly rife in England
and Wales, Ireland and Australia, for example. The belief
that one is unsafe in the street after dark is common among
the public everywhere, but especially so in England and
Wales and Scotland. Practical steps against crime, such as
installing a burglar alarm at home, are especially common
in England and Wales but more so in Ireland.
Surveys of the public’s fear of crime are very common.
Despite the abundance of statistics collected over more
than fifty years, not too much is known about the psychological meaning of the concept of fear of crime. One might
suggest that it is a political rather than a psychological
concept. Long-term data is available from various sources,
but one of the most useful is the British Crime Survey
(now known as the Crime Survey of England and Wales).
This regularly asks a random sample of the public about a
Table 3.1 Some international comparisons for indicators of fear of crime
Indicator of fear
England and Wales
Scotland
Ireland
Australia
Canada
USA
Burglary of house likely or
very likely in coming year
35%*
21%
33%
36%
25%
16%
Feel unsafe or very unsafe
in street after dark
32%
30%
27%
19%
17%
19%
% homes with a burglar
alarm system
42%
33%
49%
27%
28%
28%
*Figures taken from van Dijk, van Kesteren and Smit (2007)
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What influences fear of crime?
range of crime-related matters, including their fear of
crime (Allen, 2004). Jansson (2007) reports data from the
British Crime Survey over a period of 25 years ending in
2006. Broadly speaking, worry about a variety of crimes
reached its peak in 1994 but, since then, the level of worry
has declined. For the British Crime Survey of 2005/6,
17 per cent of respondents were very worried about violent crime, 14 per cent were very worried about vehicle
crime, and 13 per cent were very worried about burglary.
The highest rate of worry was found among women for the
crime of rape. According to Allen (2004), some sectors of
society are more fearful of crime than others. Women are
disproportionately more worried about burglary and violent crime than men. Those over 75 years of age tend to be
the least worried about these crimes in this particular
study, though the literature on the fear of crime in general
is somewhat ambivalent as to whether younger or older
people have the greater fear of crime. People who reported
that their general health was poorer tended to be more
likely to be worried about crime – those with poor health
were nearly twice as likely to report being very worried
about burglary than those in good health. This is indicative
that the fear of crime tends to be greater in those who
might be seen as more vulnerable. Professionals were the
least likely to be worried about crime and people living in
the most deprived areas tended to be the most worried
about crime. People who believed that crime rates had
increased in the previous two years were more likely to
have high levels of worry about crime.
Just what does the fear of crime imply? That the individual’s life is dominated by the fear? Farrall and Gadd
(2004) queried the extent to which fear of crime is a
significant feature of most people’s lives. It is not the
same thing to suggest that many people have some fear
of crime as to suggest that they constantly or frequently
are in fear of crime. Do people generally feel anxious
about the possibility of victimisation? Typically in surveys something like a quarter of people say that they are
very afraid of certain crimes such as burglary and rape.
However, just how often do individuals feel very
afraid? Farrall and Gadd asked participants, ‘In the past
year, have you ever felt fearful about the possibility
of becoming a victim of crime?’ (p. 128). One-third of
participants said that they had felt fearful in the previous
year of which nearly a half said that they had felt fearful
between one and four times. Fifteen per cent of the
entire sample claimed to have experienced quite high or
very high levels of fear, but only half of these said that
they had felt afraid five or more times in the year. In
other words, less than 10 per cent of people had experienced high levels of fear once every three months or so.
In general, then, experience of a high level of fear of
crime is uncommon and fear of crime is not a constant
feature of people’s lives.
It is usually beneficial to consider topics in forensic and
criminal psychology from an international perspective in
order to see how this extends, challenges and improves our
understanding. In doing so, it is possible to see how the fear
of crime is manipulable by the state. For example, the fear of
crime in Poland under the Communist regime in the 1970s
and 1980s found expression in ways which were very different from the West. It was important under Communism that
the country was free from the high levels of crime which
Western society suffered from. According to Szumski
(1993), a survey conducted in 1977 showed that two-thirds
of Polish citizens were not afraid of crime at all and another
quarter said that they were rarely afraid of crime. In contrast
with the West where fear of crime is common, very few
Poles showed any fear of crime. The sorts of crimes which
Polish people saw as a threat to society were very different
from the violent crimes which dominate fear of crime in
Western countries. Poles mentioned crimes like profiteering,
bribery and corruption, appropriation of public property and
theft of private property, and abuse of power by persons
holding executive office as the most worrying. One reason
for the very different situation in Poland compared to the
West was the way in which crime statistics could be influenced by the activities of the police. At that time, the police
in Poland could include in crime statistics only offences
confirmed by them as crimes. In other words, they did not
include crimes simply because they had been reported to
them. Such a system left a lot of discretion for the police to
influence what sort of crimes should be included in the
recorded levels of crime. The police, for example, would
know that violent crime rates should be kept low and so they
may have decided that some acts of violence did not amount
to a crime. This low level of recorded crime was held to
indicate progress in building a Communist society. If crime
rates increased then the state amended legislation, resulting
in even more repressive social policies. Szumski argues that
the figures were essentially manipulated. Fear of crime, it
would seem, can be as much a social creation as an objective
response to the reality of crime.
What influences fear
of crime?
There are three main ways in which our levels of fear of
crime might be influenced:
• Our direct knowledge about crime in our immediate
community and beyond. In other words, all of those
sources of information available to us including personal experiences of crime, knowing people who have
been victimised, and gossip about crime at the local and
international level.
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Crime and the public
• The coverage of crime news in the mass media and the
coverage of fictional crime in popular entertainment.
• Personality and social characteristics which make us
more or less afraid of crime. By way of illustration,
Bazargan (1994) found that fear of victimisation at
home related to factors such as feeling lonely, having
poorer educational standards and believing that neighbours are not trustworthy and lack vigilance when it
comes to crime.
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But the relationship between sources of information
about the risk of crime and the fear of crime is far from
being a simple one to understand. Clark (2004) writes
about what she describes as the fear–victimisation paradox
following Lindquist and Duke (1982). This refers to the
often unpredictable relationship between reported fear of
crime and the actual risk of personal victimisation.
Basically, it is found that those objectively the most at risk
of being victimised are among the least likely to be afraid
of crime. So we can say that the fear of crime has no clear
and invariant relationship to the statistical risk of being a
victim of crime. Asked about the risk of violence and their
personal fear of it, the elderly tend to report the highest
levels (Bazargan, 1994; Vanderveen, 2006). Yet, when we
look to see who is statistically the most likely to be the
victim of violence, the victims turn out to be much the
same group as their victimisers for the most part: that is,
males in their late adolescent and early adult years – the
very group who in some surveys claim to be the least
bothered by the risk of being victimised. The ability to
deal effectively with an attack or assault is an element
leading to differences in levels of fear of crime. Women,
for example, who believe that they are unable to defend
themselves from a sexual attack tended to have a higher
level of fear of sexual violence (Custers and Van den
Bulck, 2013). Such women also believed that they were
more likely to suffer a sexual attack and that sexual violence has severe consequences.
Gender and the fear of crime
Women in general seem to have higher levels of fear of
crime than men. Feminists have claimed that women are
discouraged from being independent through being inculcated with a fear of an unpredictable attack by a stranger
(Walter, 1996). Put another way, this is a means of keeping women ‘in their place’. Women tend to fear the sorts
of crime that could be perpetrated against them by strangers in public places (Stanko, 1995; Voumvakis and
Ericson, 1982). However, crime statistics show consistently that it is men who are most at risk of an attack in
public places and by a person who they do not know. In
contrast, women are most at risk from physical violence
by people they know. If they are sexually attacked, it is
likely that the perpetrator will be familiar to them. Date
and marital rape are neither rare nor trivial matters
(Ainsworth, 2000a; US Department of Commerce,
Economics and Statistics Information, 1996).
Sutton, Robinson and Farrall (2011) carried out an
intriguing experiment on women’s fear of crime which
sheds light on the idea that women’s independence is limited by the fear of crime. They took a sample of men and
women in the UK and asked them to complete a fear of
crime survey. The fear of crime questions were wellestablished ones from the research literature. Participants
were asked to rate their level of fear of burglary, assault,
vandalism, sexual assault and being mugged as well as a
number of other questions. Responses to these fear of
crime questions were combined to form an overall measure of fear of crime. As one might expect, based on other
research, it was found that women did indeed have higher
levels of fear of crime than men. But the researchers did
something rather interesting. Participants in the study
were split into two groups which were given quite different instructions about how to answer the questions. The
first group were given the instruction to be ‘totally honest
and accurate’ when giving their answers. The second
group were told to answer the questions in a way which
put the participant ‘in the best possible light’. What
emerged is intriguing. The men who were instructed to
present themselves in the best possible light answered in a
way which portrayed them as less afraid of crime compared to the men who were asked to be totally honest and
accurate. It is perhaps easy to see why this was the case. It
is normative to expect men to be brave and strong, so men
faking their answers to appear in the best possible light
gave low ratings of their fear of crime. That is, they
behaved as if it is normative that men are not afraid of
crime. The women who were asked to present themselves
in the best possible light responded very differently. They
presented themselves as being more afraid of crime than
women who were instructed to be totally honest and accurate. In other words, the women behaved as if it were
normative that they should be afraid of crime. Men underplay their fears and women overplay their fears. Sutton
et al.’s research fits well with the idea that the inculcation
of a fear of crime in women is a mechanism by which
women’s freedom is restricted as suggested by Brownmiller
(1975).
Of course, other explanations of gender differences in
the fear of crime have been put forward. The idea that
some groups of people – women, for example – have
higher levels of fear of crime because they are more vulnerable warrants more rigorous examination and cannot be
taken for granted. It needs to be demonstrated that vulnerability is the explanation of the gender difference. Jackson
(2009) attempted to find support for this. His basic
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What influences fear of crime?
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research procedure was a postal survey in London. In the
questionnaire sent to participants, he listed seven crimes
including personal crimes and property crimes. Women
had no greater worries about property crime than men so
we can concentrate on the personal crimes which take
place in the street. These included being attacked by a
stranger, robbed or mugged, and being harassed, threatened or verbally abused. Participants had to make a range
of ratings for each of the crimes. These ratings included
their level of worry about the crime, their perception of
their personal risk of being a victim of the crime, their
perception of their ability to prevent the crime happening,
and their perception of the seriousness of the consequences of being victimised. Women were more worried,
felt more at risk, felt the consequences of being a victim
would be more serious, and felt less in control of being
able to prevent the crime. A statistical model of the relationship showed that women’s worries about crime could
be explained by the risk of being a victim, their perceptions of being able to control the crime from happening,
and the more serious consequences of being a victim for
them. In other words, vulnerability as measured by these
three things explains the gender difference in worry about
crime.
It is important to get any gender differences in the fear
of crime into proportion. Gilchrist, Bannister, Ditton and
Farrall (1998) argue that gender differences in fear of
crime are overstated. They make the argument that fear of
crime itself is at fairly low levels and that differences
between men and women, where they exist, are n
