Essay On Fear Of Crime

Since the 1960s the fear of crime has created dominant parts of the criminological landscape and it has also created a major role in crime policy. Over the past half-century there has been an increasing concern internationally when it comes to the fear of crime. Ferraro (1995) says that the definition of fear of crime is simply ‘an emotional response of dread or anxiety to crime or symbols that a person associates with crime’. Talking about fear of crime raises questions like ‘what does it mean’, ‘how do you measure it’ and ‘how does it start’. Fear of crime is so important that about 300 scholarly books and articles base their focus on it also ‘one of the strongest reasons to study fear of crime is the impact it has on the quality of life or what Conklin (1975) calls the indirect cost of crime in society. ‘Findings from the 2003/04 BCS showed that two key factors associated with increased levels of worry about crime
In television world there is said to be more violence than there is in the real world and it is said that the TV world increases fear amongst its viewers.
Annenberg public policy centre at the university of Pennsylvania conducted a study comparing annual changes in the amount of violence portrayed on popular primetime dramas from the early 70s through 2010 and the study shows that “Incidents of TV violence on broadcast television have increased since the late 1990s and has the public’s fear of crime, the study also says that its findings suggest that TV drama may “transport” viewers emotionally into the imagined world of TV shows in a way that creates fear of crime beyond the influence of the national violent crime rate or the reported perception of local crime”. For example programmes like ‘crime watch’ on BBC one, the show features around three to four cases and each case has its own reconstruction of the crime, they usually show the audience key evidence from the crimes, the