ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the proposition that exposure to news media and dramatization about crime, which tends to paint a distorted picture by, for instance, overrepresenting the incidence of sexual and violent crime, feeds a diffuse and pervasive culture of fear in contemporary societies, and thereby increases people’s fear of crime and sense they are likely to become victims. While there is some empirical support for this view, the idea that media exposure cultivates fear across an entire population is critiqued on the basis audiences are not passive, but interpret media-produced messages in light of their own lived experience, which is influenced by contextual factors, such as geographical location, age, gender, race and social class. The chapter explores the apparent paradox that groups less likely to be crime victims, such women and the elderly, are often more fearful of crime. It also examines some of the problems of researching crime fear, including definitional questions about what constitutes fear (as compared to worry, concern and anxiety), the relative merits of asking questions designed to assess actual fear as opposed to fear in hypothetical scenarios, as well as the notion that fear of crime research produces fearing subjects. Whether real or imagined, the chapter shows how, like moral panics, fear of crime has been used to justify the introduction of measures designed to tackle things like anti-social behavior, which have very real effects and consequences not only for would-be offenders but also for the landscape of crime and punishment in liberal democracies increasingly driven by ‘law and order’ politics.
