The Risk Society in an Age of Anxiety: Situating Fear of Crime

As many now recognize, fear of crime is an inadequately theorized concept. In particular, it is premissed on rational, calculating individuals who routinely miscalculate their 'true' risk of crime. Hence the repeatedly found paradox that the least at risk group (elderly females) are most fearful. The risk literature has adopted a cultural/anthropological rather than an individual perspective, but, in so doing has not succeeded in retheorizing the notion of the rationally calculating subject it critiques (Douglas), even if rational calculations are no longer possible in today's 'risk society' (Beck). We develop these cultural perspectives in a way which is founded on a post-structuralist theory of individuals wherein inter-subjective defending against anxiety replaces rational calculation as central to the understanding of fear. Not only does this re-link the concepts of fear and anxiety, currently divorced in the fear of crime debate, but it offers the prospect of understanding the paradoxical mismatch between risk and fear at both the level of the individual and of society.