White-Collar Crimes and the Fear of Crime: A Review

The focus of this chapter is 'fear of crime' and -within severe data limitations and conceptual controversies -it interrogates the variations in fear of different forms of crime, white-collar and other. It begins by examining the state of 'fear of crime' policy and what we might mean by 'fear' in this sort of arena; goes on to review fears of and concerns about those white-collar crimes that have been researched; and ends with a discussion of their implications for thinking and policy about fear of crime generally and about what we can learn about it from studying fears about white-collar crimes. Despite real fears and even more real consequences of frauds, there is relatively little 'read across' between fear of white-collar and of many other crimes: the embeddedness of fraud in voluntary interactive routines seems to be accompanied by a lack of visceral reactions of 'stranger danger' fear within the general population, but the precise causal mechanisms remain unclear.