From Fear of Crime to Images of Delinquency

In the last decade, a "social preoccupation" with crime has emerged in numerous Western countries, following the spread of a feeling of personal insecurity, along with the perception of a great increase of crime rates & of risks of victimization, in large sections of their population. Switzerland has long seemed a country spared by crime. Does this perception persist, while local media as well as those of neighboring countries have seized the issue of insecurity? In reconceptualizing the fear of crime as but one element of a wider system of representations referring to the intensity of perceived crime, its causes, actors, & forms, this article shows, on the basis of a representative sample of the resident population of the French-speaking part of Switzerland, that four main representations of delinquency compete that reveal the presence of fundamentally different attitudes toward modernity. 6 Tables, 1 Figure, 24 References. Adapted from the source document.