(Introduction) Crime, as a generally understood concept, involves any voluntary activity which violates a law. With that said, few are very fearful of parking tickets in the way others are fearful of robbery, rape, and murder. Therefore, a discussion of the relationship between fear and crime will, for practical purposes, center itself closer toward the violent end of the spectrum of possible criminal activity, rather than on the side of the more mundane, pedestrian forms of crime. Fear of crime, then, may more accurately be written as fear of violence. However, violence alone is not universally evocative of a fear response. Consider action movies, boxing matches, ball games, and even street fights, where crowds of people watch violence and cheer and gamble with little to no visible evidence of fear at all. The operative component of fear of violence is not of the violence itself, which in many contexts may amount to purely inconsequential spectacle, but rather fear of victimization.
The AutoPilot
An archive of secrets, sources, and uncertainty.