코로나19 팬데믹에 따른 사회적 불안이 범죄 두려움 인식의 다양성에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The fear of crime in late modernity is related to how they made sense of their environment and to their interpretation of wider social changes. Much of recent study on the fear of crime have pointed how social anxieties relate to wider shifts in social formations and economic systems. Scholars have argued that a time of rapid social change, of decreasing certainty, of increasing diversity and liberalization, and of decreasing deference to authority, crimes were entangled with broader issues of nation­states control and economic inequality. When we approach the fear of crime along such lines, we can observe the social meaning of COVID­19 in a different way. This study adopted a person­centered approach using latent profile analysis with South Korea survey data during COVID­19 pandemic. The results are as follows: First, the public was separated by three groups as an "anxious group" with high fear before and after COVID­19, an "alert group" with a tendency to increase fear due to COVID­19, and a "cautious group" with a moderate tendency between the two groups. Second, while the anxiety group has the complex worry amalgamating all kinds of fear of crime since COVID­19, the alert group has the interconnected concern combining a personal fear with vicarious fear after COVID­19. Third, after COVID­19 the determinants of group separation from fear of crime were gender, age, household income, number of family, type of residence, experience of victimization. In conclusion, public perception of fear of crime after COVID­19 seems to be differentiated into the anxiety group whose are afraid of victimization including women, the alert group whose are consisted with many young men, and the moderate cautious group. The emergence of the alert group who have begun to worry about fear of crime after COVID­19 shows that COVID­19 can reveal social anxiety in late modernity through fear of crime.