Gender Specific Emotional Responses to Anticipated Crime

Abstract

In this paper multivariate analyses are used to test two hypotheses specific to the assumption that women are more fearful of crime than men. First, national crime survey responses to a global fear of crime question were analysed to assess whether responses to global questions were biased towards particular crime types. Results show that non-specific global fear of crime questions elicit responses most associated with fear of physical harm - explaining the persistent finding in previous research that women are more fearful than men. Second, a two-dimensional measure of fear of crime was derived from six crime specific fear of crime responses. Gender and control variables were regressed onto the derived measures of fear to test the hypothesis that dimensions of fear are gender specific. Results show that women are relatively more fearful of personal harm but no gender difference was found for fear of property loss. These data are consistent with a physical vulnerability explanation and, taken together, suggest that the irrationality hypothesis can be rejected.