Reactions to Victimisation: Why has Anger been Ignored?

Abstract

Mrs Basham beats the burglar Two elderly women described yesterday how they floored a teenage burglar and held him 'like a wriggly worm' by tying his legs with a handbag strap and sitting on top of him. Edith Basham, 69, and her aunt, Doris Ray, a frail 84-year-old, saw the intruder removing glass to break into a house and intervened. With John Roberts, a 64-year-old neighbour, they grappled with the 17-year-old burglar and held him despite sustaining cuts and bruises as he punched and kicked them. Mrs Basham, a grandmother, said: 'We are pensioners but not pushovers. None of us felt fear, just anger'. 2 IntroductionWe have been investigating the phenomenon of the 'fear' of crime with increasing scepticism since 1994. Initially tasked to check what had become a rather woolly concept, this Economic and Social Research Council-funded project 3 has been able to make some useful inroads into question-design choices, 4 and some further re-analysis of common explanatory models is under way. 5 Some suggestions relating to recommendations for future crime and fear of crime surveying have been made, 6 and some contributions to substantive issues published or forthcoming. 7 This article extends the argument advanced elsewhere: 8 the idea that 'anger' about crime is rather more common than is 'fear' (although this does not mean that those who are angry Page 38Jason Ditton, Stephen Farrall, Jon Bannister, Elizabeth Gilchrist and Ken Pease Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal might not also be fearful). That article considered the general feelings that members of a random sample (of 1,629 domestically-resident Scottish adults, living in the region then called Strathclyde) thought they would experience when considering the prospect of victimisation. Of the total, 396 individuals had experienced a total of 638 prior-year victimisations, and for the purposes of that article, they were treated as 'victims'. That article concluded that, however the sample was divided (whether by age, gender or victim status), anger, rather than fear, was the dominant prospective response.This article uses different victimisation data, but from the same survey. In addition to assessing the extent of prior-year victimisation, the 396 respondents were probed in rather more detail about the most recent prior-year victimisation they had experienced. 9 This total of 396 was fashioned from 112 housebreaking cases, 175 vehicle crime ones, 68 assaults, and 41 cases of vandalism. The 396 respondents provided data on how long ago the victimisation occurred, where it happened, how they felt initially, how they felt later, what the worst thing about the victimisation was, and whether or not they felt they had been specifically targeted.In a sense, this article merely states the obvious. It would be faintly daft to 'worry' about or 'fear' something which has already happened (although not that it might happen again). Yet so obsessed have analysts been with the 'fear' of crime that other responses to victimisation have effectively bee...

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