I found this website which has a lot of good information explaining how and why most people have a fear of crime. I started my search trying to find information about why many women fear walking home alone and also why the idea of NOT walking alone in the dark is something that is constantly repeated to us by family and friends. I began to wonder if this fear was inherently positive or negative for women to carry. This article talks about the fact that the likelihood of being a victim of crime is so miniscule, however does that make the actual fear of being a victim obsolete? Should women be afraid so that they are more cautious or should we listen to the facts and walk home alone because we technically only have a one in ten thousand chance of being a victim? Is fear of crime a larger social crime than fear itself as the author states? I would be interested to find out.
Don't miss the other topics covered under "Additional Topics".
http://law.jrank.org/pages/1189/Fear-Crime.html
When reading this article I found myself relating back to what I learned from a guest speaker in my violence in intimate relationships class. Women would often have a fear of crime have had some type of incident in their life or someone they know of has. Women are likely to be sexually assulted by men they most often know, which gets me thinking that "can we trust are so called good guy friends?" In the textbook Reeve mentions that fear is an emotional reaction that arises from a person's interpretation that the situation that he/she faces is dangerous and a thrat to one's well-being. Also Reeve mentions that fear is mostly about perceived vulnerability to being overwhelmed by a danger/threat. Many people don't know how to cope with fear, like the fear of walking alone at night.
http://www.vpaf.uni.edu/pubsaf/index.shtml
Here is a link to the UNI police department page which talks preventions, programs, sexual assualt and much more. I know I'm going off of this article and making it more broader, but check it out. It had a lot of useful information for you, or someone you may know that has ever been of victim or can't cope with the fear of what happend and so forth.
I thought that this article was very interesting, I have always felt safe walking on campus by myself at night, weather that was a good thing or not. However now that I live in Waterloo I do find myself a little fearful when I am taking my dog out at night. I try to tell myself that I need to feel safe in my neighborhood and I shouldn't have anything to worry about. But even though the rate of crime is actually low that is what is in the news. When ever there is an assault or shooting or murder that is plastered all over the TV and it makes people think it is much more common than it actually is. I personally think fear is a good thing, it is needed for survival, but it can get out of hand. In a way I kind of agree with the author when they said "Fear of crime, then, is a much larger social problem than crime itself (Warr, 1994, 1995)"I don't know if I would fully agree to the extent that the author is saying but I think that our society has let the media let fear of crime get a little out of control, compared to the actual statistics.