Misplaced Fear? Assessing the Impact of Demographics and Media Consumption on American’s Fear of Violent Crime

In a nation with ideals grounded in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, having a large portion of the population disproportionately living in fear would challenge such ideologies. I will be examining how race, gender, and media consumption are critical factors that play into an individual's level of fear regarding violent crimes. Relying on The Chapman Survey of American Fears, a comprehensive data source that surveys and catalogs the fears of American adults, I analyzed how these varying factors interact with one another. Through careful analysis, I found that despite women's, particularly women of color, elevated fear of violent crime, they are statistically less likely to experience violent crime than their male counterparts. Logically, this leads to the question of why women fear violent crime on such a high level. Although the research has proposed many possible explanations, like the increase of crime media in the past few decades or evolutionary and cultural norms, these elements are insufficient. While they are all valid contributors to the fear of violent crime, the major contributor is that women fear violent crime so severely because they fear sexual assault disproportionately more than men. Knowing that women's fear of violent crime is tied inextricably to fear of sexual assault helps to explain the elevated fear of violent crimes that is not adequately explained by past studies. Cataloging and understanding this data is the first step in bridging this racial and gender divide and eventually finding a way to reduce such fears significantly.