Citation

Smith MD. J. Fam. Violence 1988; 3(1): 29-38.

Affiliation

Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, Canada

Copyright

(Copyright © 1988, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/BF00994664

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Government-sponsored national victimization surveys in several countries have found consistently that women''s fear of violent crime is much greater than their actual chances of being violently victimized. Not suprisingly, most attempts to account for this discrepancy begin with the assumption that women''s fear is subjectively based. A few feminist theorists, however, have challenged this view. They argue that women''s fear of violent crime is much more objective than the crime surveys indicate. Women''s fear results in part, they suggest, from being physically abused by a husband, boyfriend, or other male intimate; an experience largely untouched in the crime surveys. Such abuse creates a generalized fear of male violence, which has shown up in the victimization surveys as fear of violent crime in public places. This study tested, and found some support for, the feminist hypothesis, using data from a telephone survey of a representative sample of 315 Toronto women.