Review of 'Fear of Crime - Critical Voices in an Age of Anxiety', edited by Murray Lee and Stephen Farrall: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009 (ISBN 978-0-415-43692-2, 217)

Abstract

There is an old Woody Allen gag from his stand up days in which he describes how he was failed in his philosophy exam for cheating: by looking into the soul of the student sitting next to him. As discussed in the contributions of Dennis Loo and Murray Lee to 'Fear of Crime - Critical Voices in an Age of Anxiety', since the 1960s, a similar although grander endeavour has proliferated around knowledge of what Robbie Sutton and Stephen Farrall call the 'interior landscapes' of citizens. In what has become a formidable branch of the general crime control industry, the everyday fears of citizens are regularly surveyed, catalogued, monitored, enumerated, quantified, managed, assuaged, circulated, stimulated, and catered for by the market; in short, these fears are entered into discourse in general and particularly into quantitative discourse. Yet, mainstream fear of crime research has generally betrayed little appreciation of the 'thorny problems' involved in such social inquiry, let alone the wider political ramifications of it. It has preferred instead to see itself as a technical, neutral exercise in a manner perhaps redolent of Michel Foucault's rather withering general observation about criminology: 'that it is of such utility, is needed so urgently and rendered so vital for the working of the system, that it does not even need to seek a theoretical justification for itself, or even simply a coherent framework' (Foucault 1980:47). Once established with solid institutional supports, something that fear of crime managed fairly quickly, any sense of its own history and contingency, of what it does culturally and politically, or even what fear of crime means, is banished from the mind of the researcher and the research establishment.