Fear of crime in two post-socialist capital cities - Ljubljana, Slovenia and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Theorizing about the fear of crime is one of the main activities of contemporary research in the field of international criminology. The research on variations in fear levels has been dominated by sociological, socio-demographic variables, and social-psychological models of fear of crime. This article uses multiple regression techniques in order to examine these variables to compare fear of crime in two central European capitals: Ljubljana, Slovenia and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo was found to be more fearful overall than Ljubljana. This difference may be explained by differences in the roles of the two cultures in the war of the former Yugoslavia. The current article focuses on differences in culture (e.g., status of women and self-estimation) as well as post-war conditions such as economics, social deprivation, and disorganization in order to explain differing levels of fear of crime.

[1]  David C. May,et al.  AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE “THREAT OF VICTIMIZATION:” CONSIDERING FEAR OF CRIME, PERCEIVED RISK, AVOIDANCE, AND DEFENSIVE BEHAVIORS , 2007 .

[2]  Loretta J. Stalans,et al.  Penal Populism and Public Opinion: Lessons from Five Countries , 2002 .

[3]  H. Kury.  International comparison of crime and victimization : The ICVS , 2001 .

[4]  Krzysztof Krajewski.  Crime and Criminal Justice in Poland , 2004 .

[5]  Marian Tulloch,et al.  Fear of Crime , 1998 .

[6]  Jon Bannister,et al.  QUESTIONING THE MEASUREMENT OF THE ‘FEAR OF CRIME’: Findings from a Major Methodological Study , 1997 .

[7]  Mark Warr,et al.  Fear of victimization: Why are women and the elderly more afraid? , 1984 .

[8]  U. Zvekić.  Criminal victimisation in countries in transition , 1998 .

[9]  C. Hale,et al.  Fear of Crime: A Review of the Literature1 , 1996 .

[10]  B. Tabachnick,et al.  Using Multivariate Statistics , 1983 .

[11]  Andy P. Field,et al.  Discovering Statistics Using SPSS , 2000 .

[12]  Jon Bannister,et al.  Social Psychology and the Fear of Crime: Re-Examining a Speculative Model , 2000 .

[13]  S. Farrall,et al.  The Social Psychology of the Fear of Crime: A Comparison of Slovenian, Scottish and Dutch Local Crime Surveys , 1999 .

[14]  F. Füredi.  Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation , 1997 .

[15]  David Canter,et al.  Environmental Social Psychology , 1988 .

[16]  Peter Stringer,et al.  Fear of Crime in Residential Environments: Testing a Social Psychological Model , 1989 .

[17]  L. Pauwels,et al.  Assessing Cross-Cultural Validity of Fear of Crime Measures through Comparisons between Linguistic Communities in Belgium , 2005 .

[18]  Jon Bannister,et al.  Social Psychology and the Fear of Crime , 2000 .

[19]  U. Zvekić,et al.  The international crime victim survey in countries in transition, national reports , 1998 .

[20]  Geert Vervaeke,et al.  Cross-Cultural Invariance and Gender Bias when Measuring ‘Fear of Crime’ , 2004 .