Fear of Crime Among the Elderly: Foresight, Not fright

Abstract

The seemingly paradoxical result that despite their much lower objective risk of criminal victimization older persons show significantly higher fear of crime than younger ones has become a commonplace within criminology in the last two decades. It is argued that this so-called ‘victimization-fear-paradox’ can be resolved by theoretically and empirically differentiating cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of fear. Additionally, gerontological concepts partially explain the linkage between objective risk of victimization and fear on the one hand and age and fear on the other. In particular, arguments from a gerontopsychological perspective reveal that older people are by no means irrational but, on the contrary, behave in an adequately cautious way because they know about their higher physical vulnerability. It is due to their carefulness that older people are in fact less often victims of crime than younger ones. Results from a nationwide representative victim-survey in Germany are presented in order to support and illustrate these arguments. It is concluded that a closer look at the concept of ‘fear of crime’, as well as at the victimological data, explains a finding which seems to be unexpected from the ‘paradox's’ point of view: fear of crime is not a major problem of the elderly's daily life.