Untangling the fear of crime

Abstract

Abstract The fear of crime is something that we – academics, policy makers and practitioners (not to mention the public) – are well and truly stuck with. Many academics have come to regret the fear of crime becoming one of the key organising concepts of research (Lee, 2008 Lee , M. 2008 , ‘The enumeration of anxiety’ , in Lee , M. and Farrall , S. ( 2008 ), Fear of Crime: Critical Voices in an Age of Anxiety , London : Routledge-Cavendish . [Google Scholar]). Some have even called for it to be abandoned as a body of inquiry (and since the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s, academic research into the fear of crime in the UK has waned considerably). Policy makers also find the topic an irritant: it raises the emotional temperature of debates about criminal justice policies; and all too often, it leads to increasingly punitive but no more effective policies. For practitioners the fear of crime draws attention away from the very tangible reductions in crime which the UK has enjoyed since the mid to late 1990s and appears at once both a pressing concern and almost impossible to do very much about.