Socializing into fear

Abstract

Despite huge amounts of attention paid to the phenomenon of fear of crime in the political and scientific arena, research on fear of crime among young people remains scarce. The few studies that have been conducted have identified several determinants, but the relative weight of these (sets of) variables remains unknown. This article therefore not only tries to identify which factors determine adolescents’ fear of crime but also seeks to distinguish the relative impact of different socializing institutions (parents, peers and media) on fear of crime among adolescents. To do this, analyses are conducted on a representative sample of 1134 Flemish adolescents (14–18 years). The article also connects itself explicitly with the recent paradigm shift in the fear of crime research, seeing this fear as a symbol used for expressing and condensing other, more abstract and hard-to-grasp feelings of social unease, caused by fundamental macro-sociological changes.