Fear of crime
Fear of crime , fear of crime or fear of crime denotes, on the one hand, people's fear of becoming a victim of a crime themselves (personal fear of crime) and, on the other hand, the assessment of the extent to which crime is a social problem (fear of social crime).
Fear of crime has a significant impact on crime policy . By strengthening the subjective feeling of security (also dampening fear of crime), confidence in the functioning of state controls is also strengthened.
Politics and the media often contribute to a distorted picture of the extent of crime in Germany. Population surveys regularly show that the incidence of serious (violent) crimes in particular is greatly overestimated. The fear of criminal offenses is increasingly responded to with crime prevention . In the Federal Government's 2nd Periodic Safety Report from 2006, an entire chapter deals with fear of crime. The study comes to the conclusion: “Felt” crime, which is also fed to a large extent by the fact that this topic is not always appropriately presented by the mass media, which is constantly growing in its everyday importance, can also have a lasting influence on criminal policy decisions and limit their options. Politicians must therefore take fear of crime seriously, even if it is based on subjectively exaggerated notions of the magnitude of individual victim risks or a misjudgment of the development of crime. Current studies show that the fear of crime is influenced by different mechanisms of action at different levels. At the district level, Häfele (2013) was able to identify poverty as a key determinant of personal fear of crime (KF), i. H. the higher the average poverty rate in the district, the higher the average CF was. At the individual level, local social capital (trust in neighbors and the assessment that the neighbors would do something about it if problems arise in the neighborhood) play a decisive role in explaining the CF, i. H. the higher the local social capital in the neighborhood, the lower the KF (detailed: Häfele 2013).
literature
- Joachim Häfele : The city, the foreign and the fear of crime . Springer-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-531-18483-8 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-531-94201-8 .
- State Criminal Police Office of North Rhine-Westphalia : Individual and socio-spatial determinants of fear of crime. Secondary analysis of the general public surveys by the police in North Rhine-Westphalia. 2006, doi : 10.15496 / publication-21204
Web links
- Individual and socio-spatial determinants of fear of crime (study by the LKA North Rhine-Westphalia)
- On the basics of fear of crime and the subjective feeling of security (PDF file; 131 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Crime prevention Federal Agency for Civic Education, From Politics and Contemporary History (APuZ 46/2005)
- ↑ Second Periodical Safety Report 2006 ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Federal Criminal Police Office, PDF, 12416 kB - accessed on April 12, 2012
