'Doing Gender' in Fear of Crime: The Impact of Gender Identity on Reported Levels of Fear of Crime in Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract

Gender is seen as the most important factor related to different levels of fear of crime, with women consistently reporting higher levels of fear than men. Several explanations have been elaborated, which largely focus either on the irrationally high level of female fear or (from a feminist perspective) on the impact of differential socialization processes, with women being socialized as fearful subjects compared to 'fearless' men. However, both explanations imply a rather static interpretation of the gender-fear relation. In this paper, the 'doing gender' thesis (West and Zimmerman 1987) is adopted to develop a gender identity scale, using a broad range of attitudes and activities dominantly seen as masculine or feminine in a sample of Belgian adolescents and young adults. The extent to which this gender identity scale is able to explain differences in the level of fear of crime, and may therefore account for the gender gap, is discussed.