NCJ Number
174525
Journal
Theoretical Criminology Volume: 1 Issue: 4 Dated: November 1997 Pages: 479-499
Date Published
1997
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This article argues that conventional analyses of women's risk of violence and fear of crime overlook the effective self-regulation inherent in women's strategies of safekeeping.
Abstract
In the present political climates of Western democracies, the "criminology of the self" dominates crime prevention literature. What this means for women, in effect, is that they are asked and expected to see the ordinary as risky. In the time of state withdrawal of public protection, they are expected to live in a state of ontological insecurity. Women's fear of crime has been characterized as a problem that is wider than the problem of crime itself, and this widening of the concept of fear has led to public policy regarding crime prevention programs that address the fear of crime for all populations, including women. While this policy is a laudable attempt to deal with the fear of crime, it reduces women's fear of crime to just another metaphor for social decline. The danger to women is part of the legacies of misogyny. Men's violence operates as a "technology" of regulating the self. Criminologists could learn much from feminist self-awareness of risk from men's violence and their strategies for safekeeping and should question the exclusion of these practices from criminological discourse. Appendix, notes, references