ABSTRACT
Researchers and policy makers alike, characterise fear as a destructive force, interfering with full participation in everyday life in civilised society. The business of governing ‘fear of crime’, and formulating attempts to govern it, have become major enterprises for criminology, related disciplines, private enterprise, and also for government and various government and non-government agencies. The chapter focuses on a number of policy documents, statements and strategies in order to illustrate some of the conflicting discourses of governing ‘fear of crime’. It explores how attempts to govern ‘fear of crime’ almost inevitably result in a number of perhaps unintended consequences. Since the early 1980s ‘fear of crime’ has been the object of a number of different, often overlapping, forms of governmental discourse. Governmentality as method or critique is largely about identifying the actualities of government and by doing so also identifying other conditions of possibility, silences, and resistances.
