Abstract
Women’s fear of rape and sexual assault has been both theoretically and empirically linked to their fear of other types of crimes, a phenomenon referred to as the shadow of sexual assault hypothesis in past research. This thesis has been supported across specific populations (i.e., the general population of women in the United States and college women in the United States), but the research examining the shadow of sexual assault hypothesis has suffered from methodological limitations. The current research corrected these limitations and performed a test of the shadow of sexual assault hypothesis among college and university students across temporal situations and victim-offender relationships. The findings indicate that women’s fear of rape and sexual assault does impact their fear of nonsexual crimes across temporal situations and victim-offender relationships.
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Notes
The low response rate is likely due to numerous factors, such as the timing of the survey, the length of the survey, and the sheer number of Internet surveys and spam e-mails that students receive daily.
While it could be a problem among larger, more urban universities located in urban areas or areas with great ethnic and racial diversity, the small proportion of nonwhite students included in the current sample is not likely to greatly limit the results of the study since the general population of State University, as well as the population of the surrounding areas, is not racially or ethnically diverse and is overwhelmingly Caucasian.
Similar to Fisher and Sloan (2003), legal terms were not used when measuring direct or vicarious victimization; rather, descriptions of the actual behaviors were used in order to avoid confusion among students as to what should be included in each type of victimization. This likely minimized errors in responses due to unfamiliarity with legal definitions and crime terminology.
Only the measure of perceived risk that corresponded with the temporal situation and victim-offender relationship of the dependent variable was included in the model. For example, in the model estimating fear of larceny/theft committed during the day by an acquaintance, perceived risk of larceny/theft committed during the day by an acquaintance was included in the model.
Each measure of avoidance behavior was used as an independent variable in its respective temporal model (i.e., avoiding certain places at night was only used in models estimating crime-specific fear at night).
The full results from these t-tests are available from the author.
Similar to Fisher and Sloan (2003) and Ferraro (1995), fear was interpreted as the residual of the measure of fear on the measure of perceived risk. Thus, in addition to the fear measure, the residual of the fear of rape measure regressed on the perceived risk of rape was added to the regression models.
Model 2 included only the fear measure that corresponded with the temporal situation and victim-offender relationship of the dependent variable. For example, in the model estimating fear of larceny/theft committed during the day by an acquaintance, fear of rape and sexual assault committed during the day by an acquaintance was added.
For the sake of brevity, the only independent variables presented in the tables are gender, fear of rape/sexual assault, and variables that were statistically significant at the p < .10 level although all independent variables (i.e., individual characteristics, perceived risk and victimization experienced, neighborhood characteristics, lifestyle characteristics, and constrained behaviors) discussed in the methods section were included in the models.
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Hilinski, C.M. Fear of Crime among College Students: A Test of the Shadow of Sexual Assault Hypothesis. Am J Crim Just 34, 84–102 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-008-9047-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-008-9047-x