The ‘young and the fearless’: revisiting the conceptualisation of fear of crime

Psychologists define fear of crime as having three components: cognitive, emotional and behavioural. A person must perceive the circumstances as threatening, thereby triggering an emotional response—fear and protective or avoidance behaviour. While one can find some circumstantial evidence that emotional response mediates the relationship between cognition and behaviour, to our knowledge the full mediation model has never been directly tested, which was the main objective of the current study. For this purpose, interviews with young adults were performed to revisit the understanding of the phenomenon of fear of crime and help with the operationalisation of its three components. An online survey of 246 young adults was performed, the measurement validity and reliability of the proposed questionnaire were established, and the full mediation model was tested. The results fully support the theoretical conceptualisation of the fear of crime, suggesting that emotional response does indeed fully mediate the relationship between cognition and behaviour. Some novel behavioural responses in comparison to other studies is found and direct empirical evidence in support of existing theory is provided. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.