NCJ Number
189257
Journal
Security Journal Volume: 14 Issue: 2 Dated: 2001 Pages: 53-62
Date Published
2001
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This article explores the way women talk about their experience of violent crime, and about their behavioral and emotional responses to criminal threat.
Abstract
In an Australian study using focus groups and structured interviews, wide variation was found in women’s levels of fear, strategies for self-protection, and balance between feelings of security and freedom. In response to questions about safety, over 90 percent of women claimed to feel at least fairly safe walking the streets alone in the day and being in their home alone day or night. By contrast, only 48 percent of women felt at least fairly safe, and only 8 percent very safe, walking the streets of their neighborhood alone at night. A detailed examination of specific risks indicated women’s greater worries about personal crime related particularly to their greater perceived risk of sexual assault. Women’s responses to threat primarily involved discourses of self-control, risk avoidance, and risk management. Confidence in a power to retaliate in the face of aggression, a common theme in males, was rarely part of women’s feelings of safety. The people of whom women were afraid were men, and the offense they feared most was rape, yet they chose not to articulate the problem as one of male violence. Fear is usually presented as a disempowering emotion, but fear of crime can also lead to constructive attempts to control one’s own environment. Most women sought empowerment through a discourse of control over their lives rather than engaging with gendered notions of patriarchy and male violence. 22 notes.