Generally, when terms have extensive connotative baggage, it is wise to denude them. In the context of this paper, the only attribute we feel might be retained from the terrorism label is its implication that in such attacks, classes of people are deemed more or less equally ‘legitimate’ targets such that each citizen regards herself as a legitimate target. In the terrorist’s ideal scenario, insofar as it is thought through, the evocation of public fear of victimization advances their cause. It leads to pressure on governments to settle or serves to destabilize the target administration by making daily life more problematic and by devoting resources to combatting terrorism’s threat that cannot be sustained indefinitely. The evolutionary context to this book leads us to consider anti-predator behaviour by prey animals alongside public fear of victimization generated by acts of terrorism. The modal tactic in applying evolutionary thinking to human behaviour involves making observations of other species, and identifying parallels with the human condition which are then subject to empirical test, to avoid the charge that such explanations are nothing more than ‘Just So’ stories (Gould, 1980). In crime science, the most developed application of this approach has concerned analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of crime events (Johnson et al., 2009). The image of offender as optimal forager has gained some traction in the literature (Jones and Fielding, 2012) because it makes sense of the two phenomena of crime spates and patterns of offender travel,

and hence has rich implications for optimizing police patrol deployment (McLaughlin et  al., 2006; Johnson et  al., 2009; Koper, 1995). For volume crime, it seems, risk transmits itself over astonishingly short distances, as does the perception of risk. A description of Neanderthal hunting practices (Bar-Yosef, 2004) could have come from a twenty-first century description of journeys to crime, ‘Middle and Upper Palaeolithic hunting and gathering was largely determined by what was available seasonally in the local environment’ (p. 333). A second relevant area of work has concerned the conscious application of defensive tactics evolved in non-human organisms to extend the repertoire of crime reductive technology (Ekblom, 1999; Sagarin and Taylor, 2008). For example, Smokecloke and similar products respond to criminal intrusion by emitting dense (non-toxic) smoke into an area under attack. This disorients attackers and thwarts the intended theft or robbery. It is typically used in commercial premises. Smokecloke was self-evidently a squid’s defence. Squid (like other non-human organisms) tend not to claim intellectual property rights, so borrowed crime-reductive technologies represent a rich seam of defensive tactics against crime, one yet to be fully mined. Perhaps of particular interest and as yet unexplored is the use of deception in the service of crime reduction, given its prevalence as a defence in other species (Caro, 2005), and the use of collective action as in nest protection by mobbing birds (Arnold, 2000), although the practice of rough music, the beating of pots and pans outside the homes of ne’er do wells, has unexplored parallels with cooperation against shared threats in other species (Alford, 1959). In general, then, evolutionary thinking has permeated the understanding of crime in terms of offender movement and defensive technology, rather than victim response in terms of behaviour or affect. In this context, the literature on crime fear would be the obvious place to look for an infusion of evolutionary thinking, but that body of work has generally not been couched in evolutionary terms except in relation to gender differences (Fetchenhauer and Buunk, 2005) and the difficulties associated with fear reduction (Sidebottom and Tilley, 2008). Gender differences in crime fear have a plausible evolutionary underpinning, in that female survival, at least through the potentially child-bearing years, is more important for the purposes of inclusive fitness maximization (Campbell, 1999). Resistance to fear reduction is explained by predation adaptation shaped by natural selection (Sidebottom and Tilley, 2008) with, for example, fear of victimization playing a major part in explaining why older people tend not to frequent nightclubs. Vicarious victimization is important in engendering crime fear (Skogan and Maxfield, 1981). A terrorist attack in which observers see people just like them being killed, maimed or displaced may elicit such fear. Recent work on mirror neurons provides a possible mechanism underpinning possible fear contagion (Lacoboni, 2009). In this chapter we speculate about the spatial limits of the propagation of anti-predator sentiment and action through a civilian community. Under what circumstances and how well

do terrorism-induced responses propagate over time and space? Do media representations of terror attacks in other lands fire our mirror neurons? Do they evoke defensive actions? If they do, what kind of defensive actions are involved? The answers to such questions may possibly already be found in the bowels of security service buildings and unanalysed records of counts of suspect package reports and similar indices of concern, but we know of little of this data that is both trustworthy and readily accessible. To begin to remedy this deficiency, let us first look at the broader literature which may help to see what we might profitably look for.