Fear of crime is rarely a rational calculation. It does not begin with a risk statistic or a news headline. It begins earlier, in the pre-conscious body’s response to a poorly lit footpath, the sonic landscape of an empty train carriage, the smell of a stairwell, or the sight of a blocked exit. These everyday aesthetic encounters with space and place produce affect, a pre-personal, pre-emotional response, that then generates the worry, anxiety, and behavioral modification that researchers identify as fear of crime.
This article draws directly on the qualitative research of Lee, Jackson, and Ellis, whose study of fear of crime in inner Sydney provides a rich empirical basis for the theoretical argument developed here. Their work, published in Qualitative Criminology, serves as a foundational inspiration for our analysis. Using data from thirteen focus groups conducted in 2016 across the Sydney Local Government Area, with 71 participants drawn from a purposive sample of community groups including LGBTI youth, Cantonese and Serbian speakers, students, public housing residents, and workers, Lee, Jackson, and Ellis explored how the sensory and aesthetic preconditions of everyday life shape affective, cognitive, and behavioural responses to the threat of victimisation.
Our aim is to extend that analysis, restoring its theoretical core, the relationship between pre-conscious affect, aesthetic experience, vulnerability, and qualitative expressions of worry, and linking it to the broader scholarship on fear of crime.
The Qualitative Turn in Fear of Crime Research
Quantitative fear of crime research, built around victim survey models and demographic variables, produces frequency data on worry but captures little of the emotional, sensory, or biographical texture underneath it. Standard survey questions can tell us how often people report feeling worried, but they cannot explain what produces that worry at the level of lived experience (Farrall, Jackson, & Gray, 2009).
The qualitative turn in fear of crime research addressed exactly this gap. From the late 1990s, researchers began using focus groups and in-depth interviews to access the inter-subjective and experiential dimensions of fear. Focus group findings were used to argue that social, economic, aesthetic, and biographical variables condition how individuals relate to what was called a “fear of crime discourse” (Tulloch et al., 1998a, 1998b; Lupton & Tulloch, 1999). They introduced the concept of aesthetic reflexivity: a mode of processing experience rooted not in rational information but in “intuition, feeling, emotion and the spiritual,” in shared symbolic meanings and culturally learned assumptions.
Psycho-social frameworks were used to argue that anxiety is a fundamental human trait and that fear of crime is best understood through complex individual biographies and intersubjective defenses against anxiety (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997, 2000). Whether someone adopts the position of the “fearful subject” depends on biography, discursive fields, and intersubjective negotiations with others (Gadd & Jefferson, 2009).
These qualitative frameworks established a key theoretical claim: fear of crime is not a direct emotional response to objective risk. It is an aesthetic, sensorial, and inter-subjective phenomenon, shaped as much by pre-conscious affect as by cognitive risk assessment.
Affect, Emotion, and the Pre-Conscious Dimensions of Fear
The most significant theoretical contribution of recent qualitative fear-of-crime scholarship is the distinction between affect and emotion. Affect is conceptualized as pre-personal and pre-conscious: the sensory and aesthetic charge of an environment before the body processes it into an identifiable feeling (Massumi, 1993; Lee, Jackson, & Ellis, 2020). Emotion is what follows: the named, biographical, and inter-subjective response to those affective provocations. Worry and anxiety are emotional; the dark recesses of an unlit stairwell are affective.
This distinction matters methodologically. Standard fear-of-crime measures capture emotional and cognitive outputs (how worried someone reports being, how they evaluate risk, and what behaviors they adopt). They do not capture the pre-conscious aesthetic and sensory conditions that generate those outputs. As Lee et al. note, this means that policy based on survey data alone tends to address the wrong layer of the problem.
Affective fear is conceptualized not as emotion itself but as the production of emotional responses in subjects (Massumi, 1993). Emotions, in this framework, are “derivatives” of affective power equations, secondary expressions of the encounter between an individual’s structured vulnerabilities and the sensory cues of their environment. This broader conception of affect reconnects fear-of-crime research to the ABC model (Gabriel & Greve, 2003): the affective, the behavioral (or conative), and the cognitive. But it reorders that model, positioning affect as a first-order construct from which cognitive risk assessments and behavioral modifications follow.
The Origins of Worry
The theoretical framework above finds its empirical grounding in specific types of spatial encounter. McClanahan and South (2020) call for a sensory criminology that extends beyond the visual, mapping the five internal sensorial spaces (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) over the five types of external space described by Hayward (2012): more-than-representational, parafunctional, container, virtual/networked, and acoustic spaces.
Of particular relevance to fear of crime research are more-than-representational spaces, which carry meaning through structured power relations and inter-subjective engagement, and parafunctional spaces, which are “abandoned, anonymous, and seemingly meaningless”, locations at the metaphorical edge of daily life (Hayward, 2012, p. 453). Stairwells that smell of urine, lift lobbies where strangers solicit drugs, unlit back streets with “lovely little alcoves”, these are not simply dark places. They are spaces whose sensory properties actively produce affect, triggering emotional responses and feeding the imagination of crime.
Young (1996) introduced the concept of crime’s imaginary: the process by which we construct mental images of crime and how those images, in turn, make us. The imaginary allows the pre-conscious affect of an unlit space to conjure scenarios that produce genuine worry and risk assessment, even in the complete absence of any actual threat.
Table 1: Sensory and aesthetic cues in everyday space and their affective dimensions
| Environmental cue | Sensory register | Affective response | Emotional outcome |
| Poor or absent lighting | Visual (absence) | Pre-conscious unease | Worry, heightened vigilance |
| Empty public transport | Visual, sonic | Spatial isolation | Anxiety, vulnerability |
| Obstructed sight lines | Visual (absence) | Crime’s imaginary activated | Fear, avoidance behavior |
| Disorder (damage, litter) | Visual, olfactory | Signs of social abandonment | Generalised worry |
| Unfamiliar social interaction | Visual, auditory | Ontological insecurity | Heightened threat appraisal |
| Enclosed spaces with few exits | Kinaesthetic | Loss of control | Affective fear, behavior modification |
| Familiar, active streets | Visual, sonic | Sensory reassurance | Safety, reduced worry |
These affective responses do not operate uniformly across individuals. Their meaning is always mediated by the biographical, structural, and inter-subjective variables that each person brings to the encounter.
Vulnerability
Three components of vulnerability relevant to fear of crime were identified: exposure to risk, loss of control, and anticipation of serious consequences (Killias, 1990). A distinction was made between dispositional risk perceptions and situational risk appraisals, both of which contribute to worry (Jackson, 2009). Both levels contribute to worry, but their interaction is mediated by the individual’s accumulated biography and structural position.
Walklate (2011, 2018) adds crucial analytical precision by distinguishing among innate vulnerability (biological and physical capacities), structural vulnerability (the result of gendered, ethnic, and class-based power relations), and experiential vulnerability (shaped by prior victimization, personal history, and intersubjective encounters). These three dimensions rarely operate independently. A woman’s worry about sexual assault on public transport at night is innate in the sense of physical capacity, structural in the sense of existing rape culture norms (Fanghanel, 2018), and experiential in the sense of biographical encounters that have shaped her relationship to particular spaces.
“Rape culture” operates as a biopolitical structure that renders the female body vulnerable in public space (Fanghanel, 2018). This structural dynamic produces affect, the pre-personal, non-conscious charge that means a woman entering an empty train carriage late at night experiences worry not as irrational anxiety but as a rational response to a real structural condition. These affective preconditions, as Massumi (1993) would frame them, are “prepersonal”, they exist before any conscious risk calculation is made.
Table 2: Dimensions of vulnerability and their relationship to affective fear
| Vulnerability type | Definition | Example from focus group data |
| Innate | Physical capacity and biological traits | A young woman wears running shoes to escape quickly |
| Structural | Product of gendered, class-based, or ethnic power relations | Fear of sexual assault structured by rape culture |
| Experiential | Shaped by prior victimization or biographical history | A robbery survivor walks in the middle of the street at night |
| Dispositional | General sense of one’s social group’s exposure to risk | Older public housing residents normalize feeling “on edge” |
| Situational | Triggered by a specific spatial and sensory encounter | Motorist taking a quiet back road gets “butterflies in the stomach” |
Inter-Subjectivity, Biography, and Shared Aesthetic Experience
Fear of crime is not only a private experience. It is inter-subjective: produced, shared, and reinforced through social relationships, community narratives, and shared imaginaries. Fear operates through communal, aesthetic, and shared symbolic meanings rather than through isolated rational calculations (Lupton & Tulloch, 1999). Individuals process risk not as isolated calculating subjects but as members of communities with common cultural assumptions and narrative frameworks.
This inter-subjective dimension appears directly in qualitative data. Fear of crime spreads through stories, warnings, and shared evaluations of space: “a lot of people are scared” of the building, so a resident avoids the external path and goes “straight up the stairs.” The warning is not based on the individual’s own experience but on a collectively circulated imaginary. The effect produced is nonetheless real; it modifies behavior and generates worry.
Individual biography further shapes how affective encounters are processed. Gadd and Jefferson (2009) showed that subject positions around fear are “negotiated in relation to the individual’s biography and attendant anxieties.” Prior victimization, living conditions, neighborhood relationships, housing stability, and personal identity all influence whether a particular spatial encounter triggers sustained worry or passes without emotional consequence. A sensory cue that produces little reaction in one person may be, as one focus group participant described, “crippling” for another.
This variability is not random. It follows the structural contours of class, gender, ethnicity, age, and housing status, as well as the biographical contours of individual lives. Qualitative methods are essential for capturing this complexity. Survey instruments that measure frequency of worry without exploring its pre-conscious origins, aesthetic triggers, or biographical mediators produce a flattened picture of a phenomenon that is, in practice, highly differentiated.
The ABC Model
The affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) framework developed by Gabriel and Greve (2003) has been widely used in fear-of-crime research to distinguish among emotional responses, risk assessments, and protective behaviors. However, as Lee, Jackson, and Ellis argue, the standard application of this framework treats affect and emotion as equivalent, obscuring the preconscious aesthetic and sensory origins of worry.
A more theoretically adequate version of the ABC model positions affect as the first-order construct. Pre-conscious sensory encounters with space produce affect; affect generates emotion (worry, anxiety, fear); emotion feeds into cognitive risk assessment; and cognitive assessment shapes behavior. This is not a strictly linear sequence. Aesthetic experience should not be treated as separate from cognition because emotional and cognitive processes overlap (Pouivet, 2000, p. 51). The levels interact. But the theoretical argument is that affective, aesthetic, and sensory provocations come first, and that cognitive and behavioral outputs cannot be fully understood without accounting for their pre-conscious origins.
Table 3: The extended ABC model of fear of crime with affect as a first-order construct
| Level | Component | Example |
| 0: Pre-conscious | Sensory/aesthetic affect | Darkness, enclosed space, blocked sight lines |
| 1: Affective | Emotional response | Worry, anxiety, ontological insecurity, dread |
| 2: Cognitive | Risk assessment | “The city is dangerous at night”; “That route is unsafe.” |
| 3: Behavioral | Response and modification | Route avoidance, early departure, taxi use, clothing choice |
This expanded framework has implications for how fear of crime is studied and for the policy responses that research informs. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), the dominant spatial policy framework, assumes a rationally calculating actor who responds to environmental cues in predictable, uniform ways. The qualitative and affective approach challenges this assumption. Fear is not uniform. Its pre-conscious aesthetic and sensory origins are mediated by structural, biographical, and intersubjective variables, producing highly differentiated experiences of the same space.
References
- Fanghanel, A. (2018). How to break a rape culture: Gendered fear of crime and the myth of the stranger-rapist. In M. Lee & G. Mythen (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime (pp. 417–428). Routledge.
- Farrall, S., Jackson, J., & Gray, E. (2009). Social order and the fear of crime in contemporary times. Oxford University Press.
- Gabriel, U., & Greve, W. (2003). The psychology of fear of crime: Conceptual and methodological perspectives. British Journal of Criminology, 43, 600–614.
- Gadd, D., & Jefferson, T. (2009). Anxiety, defensiveness, and the fear of crime. In M. Lee & S. Farrall (Eds.), Fear of crime: Critical voices in an age of anxiety. Routledge.
- Gray, E., Jackson, J., & Farrall, S. (2011). Feelings and functions in the fear of crime: Applying a new approach to victimization insecurity. British Journal of Criminology, 51(1), 75–94.
- Hayward, K. J. (2012). Five spaces of cultural criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 52(3), 441–462.
- Hollway, W., & Jefferson, T. (1997). The risk society in an age of anxiety: Situating fear of crime. British Journal of Sociology, 48(2), 255–266.
- Hollway, W., & Jefferson, T. (2000). Doing qualitative research differently: Free association, narrative and the interview method. Sage.
- Jackson, J. (2009). A psychological perspective on vulnerability in the fear of crime. Psychology, Crime and Law, 15(4), 365–390.
- Killias, M. (1990). Vulnerability: Towards a better understanding of a key variable in the genesis of fear of crime. Violence and Victims, 5, 97–108.
- Lee, M. (2007). Inventing fear of crime: Criminology and the politics of anxiety. Willan.
- Lee, M., Jackson, J., & Ellis, J. R. (2020). Functional and dysfunctional fear of crime in inner Sydney: Findings from the quantitative component of a mixed-methods study. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 53(3), 311–332.
- Lupton, D., & Tulloch, J. (1999). Theorizing fear of crime: Beyond the rational/irrational opposition. British Journal of Sociology, 50(3), 507–523.
- Massumi, B. (1993). The politics of everyday fear. University of Minnesota Press.
- McClanahan, B., & South, N. (2020). All knowledge begins with the senses: Towards a sensory criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 60(1), 3–23.
- Pouivet, R. (2000). On the cognitive functioning of aesthetic emotions. Leonardo, 33(1), 49–53.
- Tulloch, J., Lupton, D., Blood, W., Tulloch, M., Jennett, C., & Enders, M. (1998a). Fear of crime: Volume 1. Attorney-General’s Department, Commonwealth of Australia.
- Walklate, S. (2011). Reframing criminal victimization: Finding a place for vulnerability and resilience. Theoretical Criminology, 15(2), 179–194.
- Walklate, S. (2018). Gender, violence, and the fear of crime: Women as fearing subjects? In M. Lee & G. Mythen (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime (pp. 222–235). Routledge.
- Wrenn, M. (2014). The social ontology of fear and neoliberalism. Review of Social Economy, 72(3), 337–353.
- Young, A. (1996). Imagining crime: Textual outlaws and criminal conversations. Sage.