A paradox?

For many years, criminologists have studied how much people fear being a victim of crime compared to how much they actually are a victim of crime. This is done mainly through crime surveys which will ask questions such as, ‘How safe do you feel walking in your neighbourhood at night?’ and ‘How likely do you feel it is that you will experience a particular type of crime (for example robbery or rape) in the next 12 months?’ The answers to these questions give researchers an idea about how scared or concerned someone is about experiencing crime. These answers are analysed in relation to information reported to researchers and recorded by the criminal justice system about actual experiences of crime. The difference between these fears or expectations and the recorded rates of crime form the basis of what is called the fear of crime paradox.

Put simply, the paradox is that relatively consistently, across studies, across decades, and across contexts, women report significantly higher levels of fear of crime than men – often two or three times more – yet routinely crime statistics show that women actually have a lower rate of victimisation than men do.This gender difference is by far the most consistent finding in all of the fear of crime literature. It also shows that those who report feeling the safest – young men – are actually the most at risk of being a victim of crime. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one is ever really interested in why young men have such an irrational underestimation of their risk of crime. In contrast, a lot of work has gone into explaining what seems to be women’s irrational fear. What the fear of crime paradox tells us is that gender matters as a predicator for the levels with which an individual will both fear and experience crime, but it does not tell us how. So what could be some of the reasons for this?

Typically, there are three main explanations given for the paradox, all of which may work together.The first is that gender roles mean that women are more likely to admit their fears. Gender stereotypes typically attach vulnerability to women and fearlessness to men.