Samenvatting

The ‘fear of crime’ is a buzzword among citizens, media, politicians and professionals by now. But the phenomenon seems to be as intangible as it is important. The struggle of professionals with this concept is the result of a too wide and self-evident problem definition. This article contains an alternative approach. The focus is on disturbed fear of crime: a negatively changed and problematically experienced fear of crime on the level of the neighborhood.
Through a review of the literature and previous research, we work towards this concept and apply it to the neighborhood of Kerckebosch in the municipality of Zeist in the Netherlands. As during 2014 the local quantitative indicators for ‘the fear of crime’ rose from 7% of the local population indicating to ‘sometimes feel unsafe’ to 22%, while the rest of the municipality remained quite stable. Additionally, several local professionals received complaints of multiple local inhabitants claiming to ‘feel unsafe’ in the neighborhood. Our research question was: What explanations for their ‘disturbed fear of crime’ do local inhabitants of the neighborhood Kerckebosch give?
It was highly plausible that this local rise of the fear in Kerckebosch was connected to the social re-engineering of the neighborhood, but the exact nature of the quantitative rise was unclear. Therefore, we have interviewed 25 local inhabitants. Qualitative analyses showed the local rise of ‘the fear of crime’ to be the result of: (I) physical characteristics of the neighborhood; (II) events of burglary and intimidation from the past; (III) the presence of loitering youths and – primarily – (VI) a backlash of social integration as a side effect of the social re-engineering of the neighborhood. These qualitative explanations to the observed quantitative discontinuity led to several policy advises, which were based on international effect studies.