Fear of Crime in Germany: A Report About Three Population Surveys; 1975/1986/1989 (From Victims and Criminal Justice, P 655-679, 1991, Gunther Kaiser, Helmut Kury, et al., eds. -- See NCJ-132477)

• NCJ Number: 132502
• Author(s): H Schwind
• Date Published: 1991
• Length: 25 pages
• Sale Source: Max-Planck-Institute Fur Auslandisches und Internationales Strafrecht
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: Germany (Unified)

Annotation

An examination of three German victimization surveys focuses on the affective (emotional), cognitive (rational), and conative (behavioral) components of the fear of crime.

Abstract

The Bochum I study (1975) involved 357 respondents randomly selected from the register at the registration office in a pilot study format. Results from the study are that subjective security, evaluation of the development of criminality, expectation of victimization, and precautionary measures are related to sociodemographic variables, i.e., male, younger, higher educated, and single respondents feel more safe, show less expectation of victimization, and regard the development of criminality to be more limited. The Bochum II study (1986) involved 1,434 respondents and used a methodology similar to the Bochum I pilot study. The study found that approximately one-half of the subjects in Bochum (48.2 percent) no longer feel secure on the streets at night. There was no statistically significant difference between older and younger respondents or between victims and nonvictims regarding fear of crime. The third survey was conducted in March/April 1989 by order of the Federal Government's Commission on Violence. A total of 2,012 valid interviews were obtained. There was only one question that dealt with one of the components of the perceived threat, the cognitive one. The question referred to the expected development of the number of violent crime. 7 tables and 33 references