From a Feeling of Insecurity to Representations of Crime

By Éric D. Widmer, Noëlle Languin, Luca Pattaroni, Jean Kellerhals, Christian-Nils Robert
English

In the last decade, a “social preoccupation” with crime has emerged in numerous Western countries. This is due to the spread of a feeling of personal insecurity and to the perception that crime rates and the risk of being victimized are increasing rapidly. For a long time, Switzerland has appeared to be a country spared by crime. Does this perception persist in a context where the local media and the media of neighboring countries focus on the issue of insecurity? In reconceptualizing the fear of crime as simply one element of a wider system of representations related to the intensity of perceived crime and its causes, actors, and forms, this paper shows, on the basis of a representative sample of the population of the French-speaking part of Switzerland, that four contrasting representations of delinquency exist. These reveal the presence of fundamentally different attitudes toward modernity.

Keywords

  • INSECURITY
  • DELINQUENCY
  • FEAR OF CRIME
  • SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS
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