Emily Gray

Theorising the Fear of Crime: The Cultural and Social Significance of Insecurities about Crime

This paper outlines the theoretical positions adopted to explain the fear of crime. We start by outlining the broad theoretical approaches taken to account for levels of fear of crime since the 1960s. We structure our review into five sections: The victimisation thesis; Imagined victimisation and the psychology of risk; Disorder, cohesion and collective efficacy - environmental perception; Structural change and macro-level influences on fear; and, Connecting anxieties about crime to other types of anxiety. We then, in preparation for the next two Working Papers, outline the framework that we pursue in the rest of this project - a framework that draws upon a range of insights generated by both quantitative and qualitative research in this area.

Thatcher’s Children, Blair’s Babies, Political Socialization and Trickle-down Value Change: An Age, Period and Cohort Analysis

To what extent are new generations ‘Thatcherite’? Using British Social Attitudes data for 1985–2012 and applying age-period-cohort analysis and generalized additive models, this article investigates whether Thatcher’s Children hold more right-authoritarian political values compared to other political generations. The study further examines the extent to which the generation that came of age under New Labour – Blair’s Babies – shares these values. The findings for generation effects indicate that the later political generation is even more right-authoritarian, including with respect to attitudes to redistribution, welfare and crime. This view is supported by evidence of cohort effects. These results show that the legacy of Thatcherism for left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values is its long-term shaping of public opinion through political socialization.

Small Big Data: Using multiple data-sets to explore unfolding social and economic change

Bold approaches to data collection and large-scale quantitative advances have long been a preoccupation for social science researchers. In this commentary we further debate over the use of large-scale survey data and official statistics with ‘Big Data’ methodologists, and emphasise the ability of these resources to incorporate the essential social and cultural heredity that is intrinsic to the human sciences. In doing so, we introduce a series of new data-sets that integrate approximately 30 years of survey data on victimisation, fear of crime and disorder and social attitudes with indicators of socio-economic conditions and policy outcomes in Britain. The data-sets that we outline below do not conform to typical conceptions of ‘Big Data’. But, we would contend, they are ‘big’ in terms of the volume, variety and complexity of data which has been collated (and to which additional data can be linked) and ‘big’ also in that they allow us to explore key questions pertaining to how social and economic policy change at the national level alters the attitudes and experiences of citizens. Importantly, they are also ‘small’ in the sense that the task of rendering the data usable, linking it and decoding it, required both manual processing and tacit knowledge of the context of the data and intentions of its creators.

Untangling the fear of crime

Abstract The fear of crime is something that we – academics, policy makers and practitioners (not to mention the public) – are well and truly stuck with. Many academics have come to regret the fear of crime becoming one of the key organising concepts of research (Lee, 2008). Some have even called for it to be abandoned as a body of inquiry (and since the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s, academic research into the fear of crime in the UK has waned considerably). Policy makers also find the topic an irritant: it raises the emotional temperature of debates about criminal justice policies; and all too often, it leads to increasingly punitive but no more effective policies. For practitioners the fear of crime draws attention away from the very tangible reductions in crime which the UK has enjoyed since the mid to late 1990s and appears at once both a pressing concern and almost impossible to do very much about.

Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age, period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

ABSTRACT The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.

Thatcher's Grandchildren: The Long Road to Inequality

Margaret Thatcher changed British politics – but did her policies change our political attitudes? In a ground-breaking new study Emily Gray, Stephen Farrall, Colin Hay, Danny Dorling and Will Jennings find that the ‘Iron Lady’ left a lasting impact on British social attitudes that is still being felt today.

Using Ideas Derived from Historical Institutionalism to Illuminate the Long-Term Impacts on Crime of 'Thatcherite' Social and Economic Policies: A Working Paper

In this working paper, we outline our thinking on a very large and complex undertaking; namely the assessment of the ways in which the Thatcher governments of the 1980s may have had quite unintended consequences on crime via some of the policies which they set about pursuing for quite separate reasons, but which, nevertheless contributed to amongst other things, the upswing in crime in the 1980s. Our thinking is not heavily informed by theories commonly examined by criminologists; instead our thinking about both the causal antecedents of these governments and their approach to re-engineering society, and the causal antecedents of crime are informed by thinking inspired by historical institutionalist scholars writing within political science, and sociological and economic theories of crime causation. We outline historical institutionalism and identify the ways in which it may be of use to ourselves.

Interdisciplinary Tension and the Importance of Method in Fear of Crime Research: A Discussion Piece

A plethora of research points towards widespread public anxiety about falling victim of crime (Hale, 1996). These anxieties damage individual well-being, they erode mutual trust and neighbourhood ties, and such is the divergence between anxiety and the reality of crime, so-called fear of crime has gained the status of social problem in its own right. Fear has even come to influence policing priorities and activities, encouraging a focus on reassurance perhaps at the expense of actual risk reduction. The fear of crime has attracted a great deal of social scientific interest. Yet a range of technical problems has also dogged much of the research. Some criminologists believe that methodological limitations have posed serious implications for the validity of the body of knowledge that public policy relies upon (e.g. Fattah, 1993; Ferraro & LaGrange, 1987; Farrall et al. 1997; Farrall & Gadd, 2004; see also Lee, 1999 & 2001). Others believe theoretical underspecification has restricted the breadth and depth of definition and explanation, leaving us with a contested and congested concept – narrowly focused yet vaguely formed (e.g. Girling et al. 2000). Certainly, public concerns and perceptions seem messier and more multi-faceted than current methods and concepts disclose. The fear of crime has social and psychological dimensions that require interdisciplinary analysis and innovative methodologies – yet the vast majority of research in this area has lacked such ambition. This ‘discussion-piece’ considers some of the areas of concern in the building blocks of fear of crime research and looks to other disciplines and methodologies for help. While we imagine our discussion will be of particular interest to criminologists, we also hope it will be of interest to anyone alive to the methodological trials and tribulations often encountered in social research, especially on topics that call for interdisciplinary dialogue.