Theoretical Considerations of Fear of Crime: How Adolescent and Young Adults Reinforce and Resist the Vulnerability Framework

• In Event: Narratives, Myths, and Conceptual Explorations of Crime Perception

Abstract

Globally, researchers are interested in understanding how feeling vulnerable to victimization impacts one’s fear of crime. The vulnerability framework is rooted in the perception that crime is more likely in public space, with a violent attacker, and with a stranger than is warranted by crime statistics. These perceptions of vulnerability are theoretically tied to social learning, so individuals learn what they should find vulnerable based on socialization processes and actors (e.g., parents, schools, peers, and the media). Among fear of crime theorists, then, the vulnerability framework is used to explain both women’s fear of crime and older people’s fear of crime, both of which are higher than the likelihood of violent personal victimization. Both women and older people feel vulnerable because of perceptions of their physicality, agility, health, and confidence in taking on a potential attacker.

What is less understood are the ways that adolescents and younger adults perceive their risk of victimization and how and in what ways they feel vulnerable to crime. These age groups are particularly interesting because of the ways that they navigate public space and because of their views of their own physicality, health, and agility. Further, how adolescents and young women and men perceive vulnerability to victimization risk is also understudied. In this presentation, we examine how the vulnerability framework applies to adolescents and young adults, also considering gender differences with examples across country contexts

Authors

• Nicole Rader, Mississippi State University

• Rebecca Lennox, University of Missouri-St. Louis

• Chloe Keel, Griffith University