The Japanese Journal of Criminal Psychology

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the situational factors making people elicited the fear of crime. As our previous study, we conducted the questionnaire survey in order to find out the environmental characteristics where the fear of crime might be provoked in the everyday surrounding. We found the far-sightedness, extremely low density, difficulty of avoidance, presence of hiding places and darkness at night effected the fear of crime. And females are more sensitive to those factors than males.

Then, we proceeded two kinds of experiments as follows; the first one is to seek the relevance between the previous work and this experiment by means of asking the subjects to evaluate a series of photos shot the everyday surroundings previously used. The correlation with the previous finding is significantly high (R=.67, p<.01). The second one is to examine whether the subjects' evaluations on the physical characteristics of the fear of crime are effected by the information like “this area is a Hot Spot of crime” suggested by the experimenter. The result strongly indicated the physical characteristics of the environment are predominant than any additional information.

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