Fear-of-Crime Paradox
Definition
The consistent survey finding that older adults and women report higher fear of crime than young men, despite young men carrying the highest recorded victimisation risk for most violent and property offences.
Related terms
- Lifestyle Exposure Theory
- The theory, set out by Michael Hindelang, Michael Gottfredson and James Garofalo in 1978, that a person's routine daily activities and associations...
- Punitiveness
- Public support for harsher sentencing and tougher criminal justice responses generally, which tracks confidence in institutions more consistently than it tracks fear...
- Near-Repeat Victimisation
- Elevated risk to targets located close in space and time to an initial incident, such as a neighbouring house shortly after a...
- Repeat Victimisation
- The empirical pattern in which a small proportion of people or locations experience a disproportionate share of violent incidents. Domestic violence shows...
- Risk Heterogeneity
- An explanation for repeat victimisation holding that some targets always carried higher risk because of a fixed feature, such as a vulnerable...
- Routine Activity Theory
- A criminological framework developed by Cohen and Felson (1979) that explains property crime as the product of three converging elements: a motivated...
- Shadow Hypothesis
- Kenneth Ferraro's proposal that women's general fear of crime functions partly as a proxy for a more specific fear of sexual assault,...
- State Dependence
- An explanation for repeat victimisation holding that being victimised itself raises the risk of being victimised again, for example because the offender...
- Structural Constraints
- In lifestyle exposure theory, the demographic and role-based limits, such as age, sex, income and family status, that shape which lifestyles are...
- Victim-Offender Overlap
- The empirical finding that the same demographic groups, and often the same individuals, show up disproportionately as both victims and offenders, because...
Explained in these topics
- Lifestyle Exposure, Fear of Crime and PunitivenessThe repeated survey finding that groups reporting the highest fear of crime, commonly older adults and women, are often not the groups facing the statistically...
- Repeat Victimisation and Fear of Crime (UGC-NET Unit X)