Reactions to Victimisation: Why has Anger been Ignored?
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Reactions to Victimisation: Why has Anger been Ignored? Jason Ditton, Stephen Farrall, Jon Bannister, Elizabeth Gilchrist and Ken Pease1 A previous article demonstrated, from an analysis of data derived from a quantitative survey of 1,629 adult Scottish residents, that being ‘angry’, rather than being ‘afraid’, was the reaction most respondents thought they would feel when imagining crime victimisation, irrespective of age, gender or victim-status. This article plumbs the same data base, but here considers reactions to actual victimisations experienced in the past year. When initial reactions are considered, only assault victims experience other reactions more than that of anger. When later reactions are examined, respondents report less anger (except for assault), much less fear (particularly for assault) and many more non-fear and non-anger responses. These results are placed in the context of other research, and against a qualitative background derived from interviews conducted with an initial sample of different respondents. Some possible reasons for the relative neglect of victimanger are discussed. Key Words: Reactions to victimisation; anger; fear; the victim movement
Mrs Basham beats the burglar Two elderly women described yesterday how they floored a teenage burglar and held him ‘like a wriggly worm’ by tying his legs with a handbag strap and sitting on top of him. Edith Basham, 69, and her aunt, Doris Ray, a frail 84-year-old, saw the intruder removing glass to break into a house and intervened. With John Roberts, a 64-year-old neighbour, they grappled with the 17-year-old burglar and held him despite sustaining cuts and bruises as he punched and kicked them. Mrs Basham, a grandmother, said: ‘We are pensioners but not pushovers. None of us felt fear, just anger’.2
Introduction We have been investigating the phenomenon of the ‘fear’ of crime with increasing scepticism since 1994. Initially tasked to check what had become a rather woolly concept, this Economic and Social Research Council-funded project3 has been able to make some useful inroads into question-design choices,4 and some further re-analysis of common explanatory models is under way.5 Some suggestions relating to recommendations for future crime and fear of crime surveying have been made,6 and some contributions to substantive issues published or forthcoming.7 This article extends the argument advanced elsewhere:8 the idea that ‘anger’ about crime is rather more common than is ‘fear’ (although this does not mean that those who are angry
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Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal
might not also be fearful). That article considered the general feelings that members of a random sample (of 1,629 domestically-resident Scottish adults, living in the region then called Strathclyde) thought they would experience when considering the prospect of victimisation. Of the total, 396 individuals had experienced a total of 638 prior-year victimisations, and for the purposes of that articl
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