Psychological reactions to crime in Italy: 2002-2004

We performed a secondary analysis of the data collected by the Observatory of the North-West (a mail panel representative of the Italian population over 18), describing the trends in the distribution of fear of crime (FC) and of concern about crime as a social problem (CC) in Italy between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2004. After analyzing the main sociodemographic characteristics of the people who became more afraid and more concerned, we built two models for predicting such trends using three sets of independent variables, concerning: (a) the sociodemographic and victimization domains, (b) the psychosocial and political domains, and (c) the mass media domain. Main results were as follows: (a) even though correlated, FC and CC showed different distributions, because CC was less widespread than FC; (b) during the period in question, the spread of FC became broader, whereas the spread of CC was reduced; (c) in order to predict the trend in FC during the period in question, sociodemographic and victimization variables were sufficient; and (d) to predict the trend in CC it was useful to also use psychosocial and mass media variables. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.