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The British Journal of Criminology 37:635-657 (1997)
© 1997 Centre for Crime & Justice Studies (formerly ISTD)
RESEARCH-ARTICLE |
CRIME AND FEAR: Evidence from Australia
*Vani K. Borooah, University of Ulster, and Carlos A. Carcach, Australian Institute of Criminology. Research for this paper was carried out while the first author was Visiting Research Fellow, and the second author was Research Officer, at the Queensland Government Statistician's Office (GSO), Australia. Both authors are grateful to the CSO for making available data from the 1991 Queensland Crime Victim Survey and to David Smith and Ranjit De Mel for facilitating the work. Thanks are due to two anonymous referees, and the Editor of the Journal for comments that have substantially improved the paper. Needless to say the usual disclaimer applies.
This study, which is based on unit record data from the Queensland Crime Victim Survey of 1991, conducts, using a common set of explanatory variables, a joint analysis of the probabilities of becoming, and of being afraid of becoming, a victim of personal and of housing crime. It then proceeds to analyse the relationship between previous victimization experience and fear of crime (personal and housing). Its broad conclusion is that unlike personal crime, where reducing the fear of crime—over and above concern with reducing the incidence of crime—might be an important policy objective, the policy goal for housing crime should, primarily, be to reduce its incidence. This is because, for personal crime, variations in the probability of being afraid greatly exceeded variations in the risk of becoming a victim: fear of personal crime thus emerges as a problem in its own right. On the other hand, for housing crime, incidence is an accurate reflection of fear. It also concludes that lack of neighbourhood cohesion, neighbourhood incivility and perception of relatively high neighbourhood crime levels contribute significantly to the probability of being afraid of crime and to the risk of victimization. It suggests that, in policy terms, community action might be a more effective means of combating both crime and the fear of crime than a ‘leave it to the police, that's what they get paid for’ attitude.
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