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Aging and the Fear of Crime: Recent Results from East and West Germany1

Fear of crime and the escalating official crime rate have become in the last decade notable themes in criminology and victimology: This is especially true since the reunification of Germany brought with it an opportunity to survey east German citizens regarding their inner security in a closed society with strong formal and informal controls. The results of several surveys by the authors and others will be discussed with special attention to the measurement of the complex construct ‘fear of crime’. These results show that young women especially in the new German states have the greatest fear and thereby throw into question widely reported findings that fear of crime is primarily a problem of the aged. The relationship between age and fear of crime is more complex than formerly anticipated and must be treated as multi-dimensional. Accordingly the results are controlled for residence in east or west Germany, gender, age, victimization, the size of the community, one's habits and life style, and confidence in the police.