Stranger Danger: Explaining Women’s Fear of Crime

Using logistic regression techniques with the Canadian Violence Against Women Survey, this paper examines the effects of demographic characteristics, previous experience with victimization, and risk management and avoidance behaviors on fear of crime. Results indicate higher explanations of variance are largely attributed to women having had negative experiences with strangers. Negative experiences include being followed, receiving unwanted attention, and having received obscene phone calls. One implication of this study is that women fear “strangerdanger” most, and they are more likely to be acutely aware of danger when there are unknown men nearby. Further implications of the supposed paradoxical relationship between stranger danger and actual victimization risk are discussed.