Age and Gender Differences on Fear of Crime

Age and Gender Differences on Fear of Crime The current study aimed to investigate age and gender effects on fear of crime and their relationships with attitude towards prisoner and crime, life satisfaction, living arrangement and religion in a Chinese sample. 170 undergraduate and postgraduate students, with a mean age of 21.9 years, participated in this study. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire on fear of crime. In general, women reported significantly greater fear of crime than men. A factor analysis was performed and two factors were extracted: â€Å"fear of being cheated† and â€Å"fear of physical harm†. An age-gender interaction effect was found after controlling the variable of â€Å"attitude towards prisoner†. Results indicated that older females had higher levels of fear of being cheated than males. Yet, gender and age differences in fear of fraud victimizations are a largely unexplored area. Additional research is needed to examine how women’s fear of being cheated varie s with age. Introduction Fear of crime has received considerable attention in the criminological studies. Over the last few decades, research has been carried out to explore how fear of crime is explained and handled by society. Information about fear of crime not only help us to understand and interpret what fear of crime meant for individuals and societies, but also facilitate government to develop active plans to tackle public’s fear. Anxieties about crime may lead to behavioral adaptation, e.g. taking precautions against crime and avoiding certain places. Nonetheless, public anxieties about crime may also have negative consequences for the individual and for society. For example, they may exacerbate the impact of crime by damaging an individual’s quality of life or may affect the community by deteriorating a shared sense of trust, cohesion, and social control (Jackson, 2006). The concept of fear of crime and its causation is widely examined in the criminological fi eld, but there is a lack of agreement on the definition of ‘fear of crime’. Fear of crime may involve two different concepts: an ‘evaluative’ component and an ’emotional’ component (Skogen, 1984). For instance, Hollway and Jefferson (1997) referred crime fear as ‘irrational’ response in which the ‘rational, calculating individuals who routinely miscalculate their â€Å"true† risk of crime’; whereas Ferraro (1995) suggested that fear of crime is ‘an emotional reaction of dread or anxiety to crime or symbols that a person associates with crime’. Past research has identified a number of factors which appear to make a contribution to fear, such as age, gender, race, vulnerability, neighbourhood cohesion, personal knowledge of crime and victimization, confidence in police and criminal justice systems, perception of risk, and assessment of offence seriousness (Box, Hale and Andrews, 1988). However, the c urrent study will focus mainly on age and gender effects on fear of crime. Gender and Age Effects It is well-documented that women are more fearful of becoming a victim of crime than men despite the fact that they are less often victimized by serious violent crime (Pain, 2001; Fetchenhauer and Buunk, 2005). Over the past decades, researchers have proposed different approaches to resolve the â€Å"fear victimization paradox†: (1) hidden victimization of women; (2) gender tendencies of women to recall victimization experience, and to generalize fear from one context to another; (3) vulnerability of women; and (4) male discount of fear. Most crime surveys have shown that the levels of violence against women (e.g. domestic violence) are far higher than men; therefore it has been argued that women are not ‘irrationally’ fearful of crime. It is because women and elderly under-report their actual victimization, and thus they appear to be less victimized (Pain, 2001). Ho wever, some have suggested that women tend to ‘generalize’ the actual experience of victimization across spatial contexts than men (Pain, 1995; Farraro, 1995). Warr (1984) found that fear of sexual assault operated as a â€Å"master offense† among women and their fear of sexual assault influenced fear of nonpersonal crimes, such as burglary. Yet, still others reported that males often discount their fear of crime (Smith and Torstensson, 1997). Previous literature has demonstrated that males are suppressed by the perception that it is not socially acceptable to express one’s fear; and when men are being perfectly honest, they may actually be more afraid of crime than women (Sutton and Farrall, 2005). On the other hand, the vulnerability hypothesis suggested that women are physically weaker than men and therefore they are less able to defend themselves against (typically male) perpetrators. A considerable amount of studies have also shown that that gender di fference in fear of crime often reflects gender difference in physical vulnerability (e.g. Smith and Torstensson, 1997).