Unraveling the fear of victimization among college women: Is the “shadow of sexual assault hypothesis” supported?

Using data on victimization from a national sample of college students, we replicated, refined, and extended Ferraro's models to test the “shadow of sexual assault” thesis and to explore factors that heightened women's age-specific fear of rape. We took into account temporal dimensions of crime-specific fear (during the day and at night) and used a domain-specific model. Overall, fear of rape among college women “shadowed” their fear of other personal crimes. Our age-specific results concerning college women's fear of rape largely mirrored Ferraro's results for women more generally. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

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