While fear of crime can be differentiated into public feelings, thoughts and behaviors about the personal risk of criminal victimization, distinctions can also be made between the tendency to see situations as fearful, the actual experience while in those situations, and broader expressions about the cultural and social significance of crime and symbols of crime in people's neighborhoods and in their daily, symbolic lives. Factors influencing the fear of crime include the psychology of risk perception, circulating representations of the risk of victimization (chiefly via interpersonal communication and the mass media), public perceptions of neighborhood stability and breakdown, the influence of neighbourhood context, and broader factors where anxieties about crime express anxieties about the pace and direction of social change. There are also some wider cultural influences. For example, some have argued that modern times have left people especially sensitive to issues of safety and insecurity. While people may feel angry and outraged about the extent and prospect of crime, surveys often ask people "whom are [they] afraid of" and "how worried are [they]". Underlying the answers that people give are (more often than not) two dimensions of 'fear': • those everyday moments of worry that transpire when one feels personally threatened; • some more diffuse or 'ambient' anxiety about risk. While standard measures of worry about crime regularly show between 30% and 50% of the population of England and Wales express some kind of worry about falling victim, probing reveals that few individuals actually worry for their own safety on an everyday basis. One can thus distinguish between fear and some broader anxiety. Some people may be more willing to admit their worries and vulnerabilities than others. People who feel specially vulnerable to
victimization are more likely (than those with less fear of crime) to report feeling less able to defend themselves, low
self-efficacy, believing that the consequences would be more significant, and being a likelier target of crime. Warr (1987) argued that 'sensitivity to risk' is not the same for all crimes and can vary dramatically from crime to crime depending on the perceived seriousness of a crime.
First- and second-hand experiences Hearing about events and knowing others who have been victimised are thought to raise perceptions of the risk of victimization. This has been described as a 'crime multiplier', or processes operating in the residential environment that would 'spread' the impacts of criminal events. Skogan cautions '… many residents of a neighbourhood only know of [crime] indirectly via channels that may inflate, deflate, or garble the picture.'
Perceptions of a community Public concern about neighbourhood disorder, social cohesion and collective efficacy correlates with fear of crime. Such 'day-to-day' issues ('young people hanging around', 'poor community spirit', 'low levels of trust and cohesion') produce information about risk and generate a sense of unease, insecurity and distrust in the environment (incivilities signal a lack of conventional courtesies and low-level social order in public places). Moreover, many people express through their fear of crime some broader concerns about neighbourhood breakdown, the loss of
moral authority, and the crumbling of civility and social capital. People can come to different conclusions about the same social and physical environment: two individuals who live next door to each other and share the same neighbourhood can view local disorder quite differently. Some research out of the UK has suggested that broader social anxieties about the pace and direction of social change may shift levels of tolerance to ambiguous stimuli in the environment. Yet the relationship between fear of crime and
mass media lacks consensus in its causal ordering; do people fear crime because a lot of crime is being shown on television, or does television just provide footage about crimes because people fear crime and want to see what's going on? A number of studies suggest that the media selectively covers crime, distorting the perception of the everyday world of crime.:4 Some scholars suggest the fear of crime is a more serious threat than crime itself;:206
Clive Emsley argued that, due to their being commercial entities seeking profit, newspapers have always discussed more serious crimes disproportionately when compared to minor crimes. In 2022, Lee, Ellis, Keel, Wickes, and Jackson have found that media fragmentation serves a protective function in challenging law-and-order rhetoric that might amplify fear of crime. == Relationship to crime rates ==