Fear of Crime and Locale: The Impact of Community Related Factors upon Fear of Crime

Traditional accounts of fear of crime and victimisation have largely concentrated on factors associated with the individual such as their age, sex or ethnicity and more recently in Northern Ireland their religion. This conventional approach, adopted by many national victimisation surveys such as the British Crime Surveys and the Northern Ireland Crime Survey, has lead to assertions that, for example, women and older people are more anxious about victimisation and Protestants in Northern Ireland are more worried about terrorist attack than their Catholic counterparts. Drawing on the results of the first community based crime survey conducted in Northern Ireland, this paper explores the extent to which the community in which an individual lives, as opposed to their individual characteristics, directly impacts on their fear of crime. It is argued that, by overlooking the significance of community based factors, some criminologists may actually be obscuring our understanding of the dynamics of this fear.