Worrying Times: The fear of crime and nostalgia

Abstract

As well as finding empirical relationships between victimisation, key socio-demographic variables, and various psychological and environmental processes, criminologists have long suspected that the feelings now identified, corralled together and labelled as ‘the fear of crime’ have roots in the wider shifts in the social, economic bases of society. In this paper, and using survey data from a nationally-representative sample of Britons aged over 16 (n = 5781), we explore the relationships between feelings of political and social nostalgia and the fear of crime. We find that nostalgia is indeed strongly related to crime fears, and, indeed, stronger even than variables such as victimisation, gender, and age (three of the frequently cited associates of fear). We go on to explore these relationships further in terms of different socio-economic classes, and relate feelings of nostalgia and fear to their recent (i.e. post-1945) historical trajectories.