ABSTRACT
When faced with writing an Introduction, or indeed any sort of overview of the fear of crime, one is immediately struck with two questions. The first is ‘where to begin?’ and the second is ‘is there anything left to say?’. We think that there is still plenty left to say about the creature which has become known as the fear of crime (and since we do not intend to attempt an overview of the field, we give the first question a bit of a body-swerve). Those hoping to find between the covers of this book a review of the relationship between the fear of crime and various socio-demographic variables, or looking for a ‘quick fix’ to issues of how to reduce the fear of crime for some or other government target will find themselves sorely disappointed. We make no apologies for this. Such is the generally repetitive nature of most research on the fear of crime that Hale’s review (drafted in the early 1990s and published in 1996) is still an excellent summary of the field. However, this collection, we hope, drives on the debates which surround the fear of crime. All of the chapters are written by people who have some considerable experience of researching and thinking about the topics at hand. Our ‘critical voices’ come from around the industrialised world and from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds (urban geographers, sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalytically-inspired criminologists, political studies, and so on). Yet each, in some way, challenges some of the basic premises of the field. We shall return to these voices and what they have to say presently, but before we do we want to locate the fear of crime both in terms of the shifting nature of the debates and in terms of its place in wider social and political processes.
