The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime

Murray Lee, Gabe Mythen, Murray Lee, Gabe Mythen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138120334
• eBook ISBN: 9781317311072
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime brings together original and international state of the art contributions of theoretical, empirical, policy-related scholarship on the intersection of perceptions of crime, victimisation, vulnerability and risk. This is timely as fear of crime has now been a focus of scholarly and policy interest for some fifty years and shows little sign of abating. Research on fear of crime is demonstrative of the inter-disciplinarity of criminology, drawing in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, political science, history, cultural studies, gender studies, planning and architecture, philosophy and human geography. This collection draws in many of these interdisciplinary themes.

This collections also extends the boundaries of fear of crime research. It does this both methodologically and conceptually, but perhaps more importantly it moves us beyond some of the often repeated debates in this field to focus on novel topics from unique perspectives. The book begins by plotting the history of fear of crime's development, then moves on to investigate the methodological and theoretical debates that have ensued and the policy transfer that occurred across jurisdictions. Key elements in debates and research on fear of crime concerning gender, race and ethnicity are covered, as are contemporary themes in fear of crime research, such as regulation, security, risk and the fear of terrorism, the mapping of fear of crime and fear of crime beyond urban landscapes. The final sections of the book explore geographies of fear and future and unique directions for this research.

Part I
Histories of fear of crime

1
Fear of crime before ‘fear of crime?’

Barry Godfrey

Introduction

The nineteenth century sporadically experienced periods of heightened anxiety particularly about violent crime. Following the end of convict transportation in the mid 1850s, Londoners felt their insecurities increase as convicts who would have completed their sentences on Australian soil (and then stay there) were released from British prisons. Concern grew that ex-prisoners would be free to reoffend on the streets of the capital. When some of these ‘ticket-of-leave’ men were suspected of committing violent crimes in the 1860s, the popular press ensured that a relatively small increase in violent crime was widely reported, and that it grew into, what are now commonly termed, moral panics about ‘garrotting’ (the strangulation of mugging victims with a knotted rope).

Approximately twenty years later, a series of murders in the East End of London were linked together to become known as the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings. The huge amount of media attention that surrounded them at the time (and subsequently) has perhaps come to define Victorian crime for many criminologists and in the popular imagination. Both the garrotting incidents and the Jack the Ripper murders regularly feature in crime history textbooks (Emsley 2010, 2011; Johnston 2015; Godfrey 2014; Godfrey and Lawrence 2013; Taylor 2010) and are axiomatically linked to, and explained by reference to, theories emerging in the 1960s to explain contemporary episodes of youth disorder and violence. These theories have now been seized upon by historians to explain episodes of crime and violence that took place a century earlier. The main features of the ‘moral panic theory’ developed by Cohen (1972/2002) and Young (1971) is that small scale incidents of disorder attract public and police attention; these incidents are then linked together and attain greater significance because they were amplified by the media. Newspapers become the vehicle for mobilising public concerns and anxieties, and eventually there is a ‘control response’ sometimes via the introduction of new legislation, or an increased punitive response. Historians have used newspaper reports to explore crime, disorder and violence, seemingly finding a similar patterns of ‘incident – police action – media attention – authoritarian response’ in the nineteenth century as Cohen found in the twentieth century. Very little historical discussion of episodes of public disorder takes place without reference to the moral panics of the 1950s and 1960s, and Cohen’s explanations of them.

However, the moral panic theories developed by Cohen (1972/2002) and Young (1971) are now heavily contested, and other theories have emerged to explain attitudes towards crime and fear of crime (Lee 2007; Farrall, Jackson and Gray 2009). However, these new theories are rarely used by historians. Is that because the panics of the 1860s and 1880s do not fit into the modern defined paradigm around ‘fear of crime’ debates? Why have neither historians, nor criminologists for that matter, even tried to explain historical events using modern criminological theory? In order to answer this question, this chapter first discusses how and why moral panic theory has been applied to both the garrotting and Jack the Ripper, ‘panics’. It then questions whether the episodes which formed moral panics can also inform us about general concerns and fears about crime and disorder in nineteenth and twentieth century society. Do more modern theories of the ‘fear of crime’ offer a more useful framework, not least to analyse more commonplace anxieties and fears about the risk of victimisation? Since the sources used by historians have to a great extent determined the theory they have applied to explain empirical evidence, the article concludes by questioning whether it is possible to use a wider range of historical sources to provide a better explanation for both ‘panics’ and ‘everyday’ fears about crime in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whilst diaries and biographies may provide something of the flavour of fear amongst the eighteenth century propertied classes; the rich and (comparatively) plentiful oral histories of ‘ordinary people’ may shed light on everyday fears in twentieth and twenty-first century society.

The Garrotting Panics of the 1860s

The panic over ‘garrotting’ was initially precipitated by an attack on a Member of Parliament, who was assaulted on his way from the House of Commons to his London club (Davis 1980: 191). Normally an assault on one man, even one with such a high profile, would not have attracted the amount of attention that this event did. The Sun, The Times, and the Observer, as well as satirical magazines such as Punch and the Saturday Review, linked a small number of street robberies to widespread concern about the ‘softness’ of the penal system. The timing of the robberies was key. After 1855 the large-scale transportation of convicts to Australia slowed, which meant that criminals who would have served their time and been released on Australian soil, would now be released in their own country. The national system of penitentiaries which had been established to replace the Australian penal colonies were shown to be fairly ineffective (annual judicial statistics first published in 1857 showed that the prison system was expanding, but that recidivism was rife). The annual statistics collected by the police and the courts also revealed to the public a new category of ‘criminal classes and habitual offenders’ who were said to inhabit the rookeries and haunts of the ‘inner cities’. This putative group comprised those who had been in custody before, and who seemed to be unreformed by their experience of imprisonment. Taylor describes how isolated violent incidents reported in the press emphasised the danger that lay in trusting ‘others’ or in straying into violent parts of town where the criminal classes could prey upon honest citizens (Taylor 2010: 37–39; 75).

Public outcry about the threat that this group posed caused the government to enact legislation to increase the length of prison sentences for repeat offenders, and increase the level of surveillance over habitual offenders in an attempt to incapacitate the ‘criminal classes’. In 1863 Parliament passed the Garrotters Act, which reintroduced corporal punishment for those convicted of armed or violent robbery, and in the late 1860s and early 1870s a raft of habitual offender legislation was passed in order to supervise ticket-of-leave men (ex-prisoners released on conditional license). The legislation was mainly ineffective (see Godfrey, Cox and Farrall 2010) and the threat of the criminal classes appeared to be undiminished. Indeed, since the criminal classes were largely a figment of the public and media imagination there never was any possibility of either eradicating it, or of reducing public anxiety about its activities. Nevertheless, the concept of a criminal class further developed unabated throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Devoid of morals, and of honest employment, this group were positioned as outside of normal society; not just geographically separate, but also distanced from the normative moral framework of ordinary people (Mayhew 1851–61; Plint 1851; Godfrey and Lawrence 2013). They were to be feared, to be guarded against. The more one was armed with information about potential threats, the more one could mitigate risk in everyday life (McGowen 1990: 50; Stedman Jones 1976: 14). Henry Mayhew (1851–61) and Charles Booth (Life and Labour of the People 1889, 1892–7, 1902–3, see https://booth.lse.ac.uk/) mapped out the dangerous classes. One of the key distinctions that was made by contemporaries (such as Mayhew) and by modern historians, is that the dangerous classes were distinct from the working classes, who were also cautioned against becoming prey for their unscrupulous near-neighbours. However, despite the acquisition of knowledge about the criminal classes and their habits, risk for the most dispossessed of the urban poor could not always be mitigated, as a series of eleven murders in 1888 demonstrated.

The Jack the Ripper panic

Thirty years after the ‘Garrotting Panics’, the unsolved murders of eleven women, all horribly mutilated and disfigured during the attacks, drew attention to the poor and dangerous living conditions for residents of the East End slums. The 1888 Whitechapel (or Jack the Ripper) murders have subsequently become emblematic of late nineteenth century anxieties about violent predatory ‘fiends’ stalking the streets of London. A series of relatively small newspaper reports from the spring of 1888 to the autumn of 1891 are almost all of the remaining evidence of the events that took place in the East End of London. However, the scale of debate created by Jack the Ripper has generated a vast archive of comment emanating from the 1890s and continuing to the present day (there are nearly five thousand books for sale on Amazon which have Jack the Ripper in the title).

Both Walkowitz (1992) and Leps (1992) have described how stories woven around the White-chapel murders contributed to, and were located within, existing social anxieties. Coming at a time when English people seemed very anxious about the way the world was changing (e.g. social pollution, the biological and moral degeneration of the species) the Whitechapel murders were newsworthy in a number of ways. The murders were committed in the capital of the British Empire, but in a separate working-class ‘city’ which remained in the shadows of Victorian civil consciousness; and, although this was by no means unique in the Victorian period, the identity of the murderer was, and remains, unknown. Various hypotheses about the true identity of the killer kept the story playing in the public eye. The newspapers exploited their readers’ interest in crime and criminality with items about the crimes (the more gruesome and more daring the better) and speculative opinion about the ‘type’ of people who were thought to be genetically-disposed or social-conditioned to pursue a life of crime (see Hahn-Rafter 1997; Davis 1980; Bartrip 1981 and Sindall 1987). Whilst these contemporary opinions are unconvincing to modern criminologists, they do, at least, provide evidence of contemporary attitudes towards criminality. All of these factors helped to stoke up the story for a while. However, the newspaper reports fell away as the news agenda moved on, and by 1892 stories of Jack the Ripper had substantially diminished in contemporary newspapers. The Whitechapel murders only became solidified into an homogeneous narrative a few years after the murders had stopped. The story of the murders was by that time consolidated into a narrative which suited social reformers and moral entrepreneurs alike. The amount of newspapers and published text on the Jack the Ripper murders which spilt across public consciousness in the twentieth/twenty-first century, vastly exceeds the surprisingly small contribution made by late nineteenth century sources, and the story continues to this day to be the moral panic par excellence.

Explaining the panics

Given the scale of contemporary discourse, the events of 1862 and 1888 created a number of research avenues for historians to explore: the scale of sexual and violent crime in Victorian England and the institutional response towards it, the conditions endured by the urban poor, the growth of the sensationalist press, and so on. However, when explaining the course of the panics themselves, Cohen’s moral panic theory is a common thread running through them.

Cohen’s study of youth subcultures, first published in 1972, and the episodes of youth disorder in the 1960s that he drew upon, are now themselves considered part of modern history (Emsley 2011: 63). His analysis of the media reaction towards a series of public battles between ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’ culminated in the outlining of five stages to the evolving ‘panic’ which started with an initial event which was then subsequently amplified by the media and by moral entrepreneurs (often distorting and exaggerating the phenomena in the process) and ending with an authoritarian response. Cohen’s moral panic theory is heavily employed by historians of crime. Although there are many historians who are influenced by Marxist or Foucauldian theory, historians are generally somewhat wary of using theoretical frames to explain the phenomena they study (see Godfrey 2011). However, moral panic theory is somehow seen as more useable and acceptable to historians than are other theories. The most direct application of Cohen’s theory to Victorian society is seen in the work of Robert Sindall in Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century (1990):

First, such panics are periodic and form distinct episodes which once finished are often forgotten.… Second, the panics stem from a group of persons being defined as a threat to societal values. The perpetrators of street violence were certainly at odds with the values of the middle-class life of respectability, security and sedentary occupation. Thirdly, the mass media presents the threat in a stylised and stereotyped fashion. This too is demonstrable in all the moral panics of the second half of the nineteenth century. Fourth… the moral barricades are manned by right-thinking people such as editors and politicians and socially-accredited experts pronounce their solutions. Fifthly, stop-gap measures are resorted to, which, in the nineteenth-century, involved hurried self-protection by individuals and increased presence of the police until th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of graphs
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Histories of fear of crime
• PART II Mediating fear of crime
• PART III Methodologies and conceptual debates
• PART IV Dissecting and stratifying fear of crime
• PART V Law, regulation and policing the fear of crime
• PART VI Contexts and geographies of fear of crime
• PART VII Connecting fear of crime: new approaches and ways forward
• Conclusion: Advancing fear of crime? Emergent themes and new directions
• Index