ABSTRACT
Within the discipline of criminology, a large amount of research has been conducted into both the fear of crime and victimisation. Nonetheless, much of the work here has failed to capture the particularities of individual experience. Surveys have often been carried out in which individuals have been grouped according to very general categories such as gender, class or race and yet there may be important differences between the persons who have been grouped together within a general category. This is particularly significant when looking at the issue of race, since the categories used to define individuals are in many cases so general that they obscure significant religious and cultural differences. So, for example, the category ‘Asian’ glosses over the differences in experiences between individuals practising different faiths. Indeed, the issue of religion has rarely, if ever, been raised by criminologists, due in part to the privileging of scientific and so-called objective discourses over less rational, less easily quantifiable knowledge claims.
