Television and fear of crime
Does watching real-life crime stories increase your fear of crime or do you watch real life crime stories because you are afraid of crime? This question remains after reading Watching the Detectives: Crime programming, fear of crime, and attitudes about the criminal justice system. Researched and written by university professors Lisa Kort-Butler and Keller Hartshorn, this study shows a relationship between fear of crime and the type of television program people watch.
According to the study, people who watch nonfiction crime programs, like ABC’s Primetime or The First 48 hours, are more fearful of becoming a victim of crime than those who did not. Interestingly, they found that people who watched crime dramas, like Law and Order or NYPD Blue, were no more fearful of crime than those that did not these shows.
The article speculates the difference is related to the fact that crime dramas show the police getting “the job done and the offender gets his or her desserts”. In contrast, crime documentaries often show the authorities one step behind the criminal while they emphasis that the victim could be anyone. Despite this speculation the authors acknowledge the limit of their study. Based upon the results they simply do not know if fear of crime is the cause or the result of what TV shows people watch. This is summarized in a common used academic statement….. correlation does not mean causation.
This limitation in research is important to recognize as it is a common issue in studies. Using statistics academics can be fairly confident that one thing is related to another but in order to explain that one thing causes another is much more difficult.
The Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council has done its own Fear of Crime Report using data from the 2008 Waterloo Region Local Area Survey. While it doesn’t ask any questions about TV habits, there are some fascinating observations and findings about perceptions of safety and fear of crime. You can find a copy of the report online.
So, what do you think, do people who are afraid of crime gravitate towards crime documentaries? Or does watching real life crime stories gradually make someone more afraid of becoming a victim themselves? The experts don’t know yet, so your guess is as good as theirs!