Perceptions of Security in the 21st Century: Their Formation, Trends and Impact in Society

• In Event: The Role of the Media in Perceptions of Risk and Fear of Crime

Abstract

Over the last fifty years, fear of crime studies yielded an extensive body of knowledge on operationalisation, measurement, and determinants of fear of crime, but remained less developed in theory formation, longitudinal trends or the impact in society. Furthermore, the research tradition seems to have been slow in accommodating the substantial changes in the security landscape of the new millennium, in which ‘traditional’ crime decreased (‘crime drop’), but new forms of crime and related threats came up (‘crime change’). To address these lacunae, an extensive exploratory study was undertaken, based on a mix of empirical and theoretical part studies. This study resulted in the development of an interdisciplinary process-oriented perspective on perceptions of security, in which notions from social-psychology (and stress-studies in particular) and complexity studies form a major part. The study makes plausible that ‘new fears’ (such as fear of terrorism or even the corona pandemic) form in similar ways as ‘traditional’ fear of crime and yield similar ‘stone in the pond’ effects in society. Lastly, both a fear drop and a fear change can be observed in western societies: the prevalence of ‘traditional’ fear of crime decreased, while ‘new fears’ emerged and increased in prevalence.

Author

• Marnix Eysink Smeets, Inholland University of Applied Sciences