Bridging the social and the psychological in the fear of crime

Abstract

abstracted empiricism (in the words of C Wright Mills – see Mills, 1953), where the sophistication of large-scale surveys and statistical procedures are not matched by impoverished theory: ‘Overall, reading the literature on fear of crime produces a sense that the field is trapped within an overly restrictive methodological and theoretical framework . . . What is needed is a strategy which begins by unpacking the concept of fear of crime. So doing will open up a rich area for debate.’ (Hale (1996: 141) The questions posed at the very beginning of this chapter might be divided into those of a predominantly psychological nature and those of a predominantly sociological nature. The processes that link risk perception to emotion fall in the first group. The social and cultural significance of crime, deviance and social stability are more sociological issues. In this chapter I argue that a comprehensive account of the fear of crime needs to bridge these two levels of analysis. I present a tentative and briefly sketched out theoretical treatise that tries to do just that. In order to integrate and develop disparate insights I draw upon an area of interdisciplinary research that has so far gone untapped within criminology: risk perception. Working within what Thompson & Dean (1996) call a contextualistic formulation of risk, the framework considers the psychology of risk; how risk is constructed and information circulated; the institutional processes and interests at play in amplification and attenuation; and the social meaning of crime that infuses and inflects public perceptions of risk. Overall the framework states that the public thinks about risk in terms of likelihood, control, consequence, vividness and moral judgement. People generate representations of risk which include imagery of the criminal event and its consequences, a sense of who might be responsible and where it might take place, and a sense of outrage – the ‘who dare they’ factor. Moreover, information about crime and images of risk circulate around society, creating what Sunstein (2005) calls ‘availability cascades.’ Certain actors amplify risk for their own institutional ends. Finally normative and cultural dispositions influence which risk individuals pay attention. Indeed because of the nature of crime, I argue that public concerns reveal their 2