Gender,Racial Threat,and Perceived Risk in an Urban University Setting

Abstract

Objectives:

We provide new insights about the role of gender, race, and place in perceived risk and fear of crime and discuss the possible boundaries of the shadow of sexual assault thesis, which attributes women’s higher levels of fear to their underlying fear of rape across a variety of ecological contexts.

Method:

Analyses are based on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with 34 undergraduates attending a diverse urban university in a highly disadvantaged community in the northeast. Purposive and theoretical sampling strategies were used, and thematic saturation was achieved.

Results:

We find striking gender similarities in students’ perceptions of risk and fear of crime in this particular context. Specifically, both women and men drew on their perceptions of disorder in the community when defining the threat of victimization, which they believed was robbery committed by the city’s African American male residents.

Conclusions:

The gendered shadow of sexual assault was surprisingly absent from students’ discussions, suggesting that it may not be as universal across context as previous research suggests. We argue that microlevel contexts and methodological factors may shape the shadow’s presence, nature, and strength in gendered fear and perceived risk.

Keywords

gender fear of crime shadow of sexual assault perceived risk racial threat

The consistent finding that women are more fearful of crime than men has led to its acceptance as a near truism in criminology (Ferraro 1996; Rader 2004; Warr 1985). Indeed, numerous studies have found that gender is the strongest predictor of fear and is strongly correlated with perceived risk (Ferraro 1995). The shadow of sexual assault is an often-cited explanation: For women, rape is “perceptually contemporaneous” with other offenses, such that “fear of crime is fear of rape” (Warr 1984:700). Importantly, this thesis is typically presumed to hold true for women across ecological and social contexts.

In addition to examining the influence of gender, scholars have investigated the ways in which fear and perceived risk are ecologically patterned. Research focused on individuals living in distressed urban communities provides evidence that perceived risk is shaped by personal and vicarious experiences with crime, visible disorder, and the perception that law enforcement is ineffective (Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Carvalho and Lewis 2003; Cobbina, Miller, and Brunson 2008; LaGrange, Ferraro, and Supancic 1992). Other studies reveal that perceptions of risk are heightened by the presence and visibility of African Americans through stereotype amplification which does not reflect actual crime risks (Chiricos, McEntire, and Gertz 2001; Quillian and Pager 2001, 2010). Specifically, Bonam, Bergsieker, and Eberhardt (2016:1578) find that African Americans and the spaces they occupy are stereotyped as dangerous and poor, mainly because “negative characteristics of Black spaces that may appear normal and natural have been constructed by decades of policies and practices separating Black people from society and depriving them of basic resources.”

We draw on in-depth interviews with women and men attending a university in a highly distressed, largely African American urban community in the northeast to examine these related inquiries, regarding if and how ecological context and racial threat influence fear of crime and perceived risk across gender. The students in our study are mostly a transient population who typically lack both familiarity with and permanent ties to the community, tending only to venture into it to work toward their college degrees. This characteristic may uniquely shape students’ perceptions of crime, risk, and fear, making them different from those of community residents, who are often the focus of research examining the role of ecological context and racial threat in fear (Chiricos et al. 2001; Drakulich 2013; Pickett et al. 2012; Quillian and Pager 2001, 2010; Sampson and Raudenbush 2004).

Additionally, we are particularly interested in whether the shadow of sexual assault is as universal across context as prior research suggests. There are compelling reasons to expect fear of rape to be heightened among women at urban universities, increasing their perceptions of risk and fear of other crime relative to men. Survey research with college samples has generally supported the shadow thesis (Fisher and Sloan 2003; Lane, Gover, and Dahod 2009), with several studies finding that college women are most fearful of interracial stranger rape (e.g., Hilinski 2009; Wilcox, Jordan, and Pritchard 2006). Such findings are consistent with long-standing accounts of the significance of the “myth of the Black rapist” as a gendered form of perceived racial threat (Davis 1983; Duru 2004). Moreover, most research on gender, risk, and fear has disproportionately emphasized men’s risk seeking, suggesting that social expectations associated with masculinity “affect men’s behavioral patterns by shaping how they think about fear and risk” (Cobbina et al. 2008:504). However, few studies have investigated whether this is accurate when men are temporarily in disadvantaged urban spaces that are distinct from their communities of origin, as is the case with many undergraduate men in our sample. Perhaps such ecological contexts, and the perceived racial threats associated with them, reconfigure men’s understandings of risk and fear of crime, such that they more closely parallel those of similarly situated women.

These are the questions we investigate here through an inductive analysis of students’ characterizations of the urban environment within and around campus, and the nature of their perceived risks and fears in that context. Our examination of these issues provides new insights about the role of gender, race, and place in perceived risk and fear of crime, and the possible boundaries of the shadow of sexual assault.

Gender and the Threat of Victimization

Scholars have long sought to delineate the relationships among fear of crime, perceived risk, and the adoption of risk avoidance strategies, which have been referred to as the threat of victimization, with emotive, cognitive, and behavioral components (Rader 2004). Ferraro (1995:4) defines fear as “an emotional response of dread or anxiety,” which may result from perceived risk of victimization. However, he found that fear of rape was a stronger predictor than perceived risk in explaining women’s fear of other offenses (Ferraro 1996). These findings comprise the shadow of sexual assault thesis: So great is women’s fear of rape that it may “shadow” and elevate their fear of other crimes (Ferraro 1996; Warr 1984).

Growing concerns about sexual assault on campus, along with evidence that young women exhibit the most fear of rape (Ferraro 1996), has motivated scholars to investigate whether the shadow thesis holds on college campuses, primarily using quantitative analyses. Fisher and Sloan (2003:651) find support for the shadow thesis, such that “college women’s fear of rape is an inseparable companion to [their] fear of other offenses while on campus.” Hilinski (2009), too, discovered that the shadow thesis offers an explanation for college women’s fear of crime but found no similar explanation to account for college men’s crime-related fears. Others have found that college women’s fear of sexual assault is largely a fear of stranger rape,¹ particularly by someone who is racially or ethnically different from them (Hilinski 2009; Wilcox et al. 2006), raising questions about the role of racial threat in women’s fears.

Notably, Ferraro (1996) finds that controlling for fear of rape eliminates or reverses gender differences in fear of crime, with men showing fear of robbery and burglary similar to that of women and greater fear of murder and physical assault. Dobbs and colleagues (2009) report similar findings among college students, while Lane and colleagues (2009) find that perceived risk of sexual assault is a strong predictor of college men’s fear of other violent crimes, thus concluding that the shadow thesis also may have relevance for men. Despite such complications, scholarship on fear and perceived risk continues to disproportionately focus on women as particularly fearful.

Indeed, a paucity of research has carefully attended to the nature, causes, and consequences of men’s fear and perceived risk, instead emphasizing their risk seeking. As Cobbina and colleagues (2008:502) note, “this lack of research [on men] results from cultural ideologies that equate masculinity with fearlessness and risk-taking. This view affects not just men’s reporting behaviors but also scholars’ approach to this area of research.” Further, few studies have examined whether men’s likelihood of expressing fearlessness is altered when they find themselves in urban contexts that are more ecologically and racially diverse than their communities of origin.

This approach leads us to ask: Are there contexts in which the gendered shadow thesis doesn’t hold, and if so, how do women’s and men’s fear and perceived risk compare? Quantitative analyses can offer insights into general patterns but is more limited in its ability to carefully analyze how individuals—in this case college students on an urban campus—distinguish and articulate their perceived risks and fears in context. Some have speculated that the extent of fear of crime may be exaggerated in the literature as a result of a lack of specificity in survey questions (Farrall and Gadd 2004), while others argue that men may actually conceal their fears on surveys due to concerns about social desirability (Sutton and Farrall 2005). We anticipate that the qualitative examination of college women’s and men’s fears will allow us to contribute new insights to this debate by exposing the nuances in their experiences, as well as the possible limitations of the shadow of sexual assault, that quantitative methodologies are unable to capture.

Urban “Disorder,” Racial Threat, and Perceived Risk

Like research examining how fear of crime is gendered, studies on the relationship between ecological context and the threat of victimization are complex. Numerous scholars have sought to distinguish the extent to which citizens’ fear of crime and perceived risk result from actual crime risks or environmental cues, including the presence of racial minorities, which trigger perceptions of disorder and risk, especially among racial majority populations. This work largely suggests that individuals living in disadvantaged and disorderly communities report greater fear and perceived risk than other social groups (Brunton-Smith 2011; Ferraro 1995, 1996; Madriz 1997; Warr 1985). This appears to be influenced by both exposure to crime (Hipp 2013) and negative evaluations of local social control (Drakulich 2013). Carvalho and Lewis (2003) argue that crime and disorder are further contextualized by residents’ knowledge of the social, spatial, and temporal organization of crime in their communities.

Other scholarship has investigated how racial threat might explain fear of crime and perceived risk, as well as evaluations of neighborhood crime and perceived disorder more generally. Much of this research has focused on how residents’ concerns about crime and disorder are shaped by the presence of African Americans, with fairly consistent evidence that racial composition plays an important role in perceived threat both for Whites and for racial and ethnic minorities (Chiricos et al. 1997, 2001; Quillian and Pager 2001; Skogan 1995). Sampson and Raudenbush (2004), for example, find that the race and class compositions of neighborhoods are better predictors of individuals’ perceptions of disorder than objective assessments of disorder. Further, Quillian and Pager (2001) report that the racial composition of neighborhoods, as measured by the percentage of young Black men, influences residents’ perceptions of crime in their communities. Not surprisingly, then, Chiricos and colleagues (1997) find that White respondents who perceive their neighborhoods as having a majority Black population report greater fear of crime than other groups, with this relationship mediated by perceived risk; processes that Quillian and Pager (2010:83) argue result from stereotype amplification, in which “real associations between crime rates and particular social conditions become exaggerated or distorted through various channels, including the influence of cultural stereotypes, skewed media coverage, perceptions of group threat, and other nonsystematic sources of information.”

Further, complicating the role of racial threat in the threat of victimization is variation in microlevel context such as community setting, ethnic composition, the extent of interracial contact, social cohesion, perceptions of changing racial composition, and additional social distances like income. All have been found to impact the nature and strength of the relationships among racial threat and perceived crime, disorder, and risk (Chiricos et al. 2001; Pickett et al. 2012). Moreover, it appears to be the coupling of race with both real and perceived socioeconomic disadvantage that heightens the stereotype amplifications associated with the threat of victimization (Brezina and Winder 2003; Kaplowitz, Broman, and Fisher 2006).

Given the complexities in research on race, place, and the threat of victimization, it is surprising that so little research has explored how these and other contextual factors might shape the relationship between gender and the threat of victimization. In particular, we question whether racial threat and unique features of certain microlevel contexts contribute to the nature and strength of the shadow of sexual assault. We examine these issues by considering whether and how gender impacts the ways students attending a university in a highly distressed urban community characterize the threat of victimization.

Method

Study Setting

Given Ferraro’s (1995) assertion that younger women have the highest fear of rape due to educational transitions that tend to place them in unfamiliar environments, combined with the fact that a large body of recent research quantitatively examining gender differences in fear has taken place on college campuses (e.g., Dobbs, Waid, and Shelley 2009; Fisher and Sloan 2003; Hilinski 2009; Lane et al. 2009), our own investigation took place at an urban university on the east coast that we refer to here as State University (SU). At the time of data collection in 2013, approximately 11,200 students were enrolled, with just over 7,200 undergraduates. The student body included nearly equal numbers of women and men and was racially and ethnically diverse. Approximately 25 percent of undergraduates were White, 23 percent were Latino, 22 percent were Asian, 18 percent were African American, and 12 percent were classified otherwise. Additionally, about 92 percent attended SU as in-state residents, with the majority coming from the large county in which the urban city is located, along with four neighboring counties. As such, around 85 percent were commuters and 15 percent lived in campus residence halls. Further, approximately 80 percent of all incoming freshmen received some type of need-based financial aid including federal grants and loans (National Center for Education Statistics 2015). Thus, the diverse student population from which our sample is drawn primarily consisted of undergraduates from working- and lower middle-class backgrounds who commuted to and from the urban city with the sole purpose of taking classes at SU.

The year of our investigation, 27 violent crimes were reported to SU’s police department, including 26 robberies and one aggravated assault. Each of these incidents involved the victimization of SU students, both on the physical campus and in nearby areas, which the campus police also had the authority to patrol. An additional 135 property crimes were reported to the campus police, primarily for larceny theft² (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 2014). SU’s crime rates are relatively high, especially when it comes to violence: In 2013, the average number of campus crime reports for similarly sized institutions³ was four violent and 86 property offenses (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 2014).

SU is located on 38 acres in a city that typifies the highly distressed urban community, with large concentrations of extreme disadvantage, racial segregation, and chronic violence. Despite this, the campus is located downtown rather than in one of the more residential areas where the city’s crime rates are highest. In 2013, the city had just under 280,000 residents: 52 percent were African American, 34 percent were Hispanic or Latino, and 12 percent were White (U.S. Census Bureau 2013). Residents living in the areas surrounding SU are primarily African American and poor, with just over 29 percent living below the poverty line and a median annual household income of US$33,960 (U.S. Census Bureau 2013). The city is frequently characterized as one of the “most dangerous” in America (Christie 2013; Duplantier 2014), with about 13 violent and 32 property crimes per 1,000 residents (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation 2014).

Walton (1992:125) argued that a research case should be chosen when “it adds something to substantiate, or preferably, expand earlier understandings” about social phenomena and theory. This is precisely why we selected SU as the site for this investigation. Specifically, the features of this particular urban environment make it well suited for examining students’ perceptions of safety and risk in a setting atypical for research on campus safety but more commonly used in studies of community residents. While a single study site does not allow us to generalize, it does offer an important opportunity for theoretical refinement via “the modification of existing theoretical perspectives…through the close inspection of a particular proposition with new case material” (Snow, Morrill, and Anderson 2003:191). As Maxwell (1996:97) notes, “[t]he generalizability of qualitative studies usually is based, not on explicit sampling of some defined population to which the results can be extended, but on the development of a theory that can be extended to other cases.”

Sampling and Data Collection

Data for this study were collected primarily as part of a graduate-level qualitative methods seminar at SU in fall 2013 to better understand undergraduates’ perceptions of safety and risk on and around campus. Purposive and theoretical sampling strategies were used to build a sample that would allow for multiple dimensions of comparison across gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, community of origin (rural, suburban, and urban), current residence (on campus or commuting), time at SU, undergraduate major, contact with the police, and experience with victimization (personal or vicarious). We recruited participants by administering a screening survey to students in introductory psychology and criminal justice classes. As the project proceeded, we also interviewed three student journalists at the campus newspaper and four students who worked with the campus police to gauge the perceptions of students who were more knowledgeable of the risks on and around campus. Although our sampling process was initially theoretically driven, such that we aimed to construct a sample of undergraduates whose demographic characteristics and experiences at SU closely resembled those of the broader student body, we ultimately stopped sampling when we determined we were no longer obtaining new theoretically relevant information and had reached thematic saturation (see Charmaz 2012).

Our sample consists of 34 undergraduates including 17 men, 16 women, and 1 student who identified as genderqueer.⁴ Participants ranged in age from 18 to 34, with the vast majority in their late teens or early 20s. We sought a sample that closely resembled the SU student body across race and ethnicity: 10 participants were Latino, 9 were African American, 8 were White, 5 were multiracial, and 2 were Asian. Additionally, six were foreign born including three international students. Five students grew up in SU’s city, and over a third lived on campus, with the remainder commuting from other cities or suburbs in the greater metropolitan area. Nearly half were criminal justice majors or double majors. About 30 percent of the sample, including four women and six men, had previously been victims of a personal or property crime on or around campus; 24 percent had witnessed a crime on or around campus; and 41 percent knew someone who had been victimized on or around campus.⁵ Only 32 percent of participants reported no such personal or vicarious victimization experiences. All of these facets of diversity in our sample were intended to allow us to investigate sources of variation in students’ fear of crime and perceived risk.

Data were collected using semistructured in-depth interviews, which were audio-recorded and transcribed. Interviews ranged in length from 30 minutes to three hours, with most approximately 1.5 hours. After their interviews, participants were given a US$10 Starbucks gift card and a list of safety resources on campus. We began the interviews by providing students with a map of the campus and its vicinity and asked them to identify places where they typically spent time, were most comfortable, and avoided or tried to avoid. This led to further discussions about perceptions of safety and risk on campus and in the surrounding community. Specifically, students were asked to describe how safe they felt the campus was; if they usually felt safe; if there were particular people, places, or things in the environment that made them feel more (or less) safe at some times than others; if there was a time they felt concerned about their safety; and if they ever felt truly afraid that they were in immediate danger. We then proceeded to ask the very same questions about the community around campus.

In keeping with inductive, open-ended research strategies, we did not operationalize the concept of “perceived risk” explicitly during data collection. Our reason for doing this was to understand the words and phrases that students use to describe their perceptions of risk and fear of crime, and whether such descriptions from our qualitative research are similar to those that have been developed from the operationalization of the term in quantitative survey research. Likewise, our interview questions did not specifically ask students if they were concerned about being harmed by a particular type of perpetrator—whether strangers or acquaintances. This subject instead arose organically with all of our participants during the course of their interviews.

Drawing from grounded theory (Charmaz 2012), after completing the first few interviews and noticing little discussion of (and variation across) gender and other dimensions of difference, we began asking students whether they thought risks for victimization on or near campus varied by gender, race/ethnicity, or sexual identity. Sequentially, these questions were asked following the ones noted above to avoid introducing prompts that might shape students’ initial accounts. We draw from both sets of responses in the analysis that follows, indicating when participants’ discussions resulted from these explicit probes.

Analytic Strategy

Because our interview guide also incorporated broader questions about students’ daily schedules, leisure time, and experiences with the campus police, our analysis began with the creation of a single data set in Microsoft Word. This data set was independently constructed by two of the authors, who included all data related to perceived risk, fear, and personal and vicarious victimization experiences, and separated these data by respondents’ gender. These two authors then incorporated any excerpts included by one but not the other to produce a final data set for analysis. Next, all three authors independently open coded the data for themes related to perceptions of risk, fear, and gender (see Charmaz 2012) before meeting to compare and discuss the themes that emerged in our initial analyses. Relevant topics were identified, and a list of focused codes was generated.

We prepared focused coding data summary sheets for each respondent, with notes and interview excerpts on numerous topics identified as meaningful for our analysis. Focused codes on the data summary sheets included characterizations of the city and its residents; characterizations of the campus and other students; areas on and around campus that students avoided or felt most comfortable; characterizations of offenders, victims, and those most likely to be fearful; references to the interviewee’s emotional state with regard to perceptions of risk; specific things that made the interviewee feel vulnerable or uncomfortable; and crimes mentioned. We then selected two interviews that all three authors separately analyzed using focused coding and our summary sheets, and we again compared our analyses. We found strong interrater reliability, with each author consistently identifying similar segments of interview data related to the focused codes; however, there were also occasional instances when one author missed something the other two identified (see Campbell et al. 2013). As a result, we ensured that at least two authors engaged in focused coding of each of the remaining 32 interviews, with each set of summary sheets compared and integrated for further analysis.

The summary sheets facilitated the use of constant comparative methods, allowing us to compare statements and accounts within and across interviews for evidence of both patterns and deviant cases and to use basic tabulations to identify the strength of patterns uncovered (see Miller 2011; Silverman 2006). We utilized these to refine our analysis of the thematic patterns reported below. Interrater reliability remained high throughout our analysis, with each author finding consistent patterns related to participants’ characterizations of risk and fear in the urban city across gender. Atypical or deviant cases are highlighted as such; otherwise, the provided themes and illustrations typify the most common patterns in our data.

Findings

The year of our investigation, 13 crime alerts were sent to SU students by the campus police,⁶ with each involving a robbery or attempted robbery. There were a total of 36 suspects; all were identified as Black men, with the exception of one Black woman who was named as an accomplice to a Black man. None of the alerts named suspects from other racial groups. We suggest here that these crime alerts, along with other features of the urban environment, contributed to stereotype amplification and helped shape students’ perceptions of threat across gender. This ultimately resulted in women’s and men’s similar accounts of both fear and perceived risk, and the striking absence of a gendered shadow of sexual assault.

We begin by describing how participants characterized the city surrounding SU, including its African American residents and students’ desire to maintain clear boundaries between the campus and community at large. Next, we turn to students’ perceptions of risk and fear of crime. Finally, we analyze how and why students focused on specific crime risks, why this rarely included the fear of rape, and when and how gender emerged in their accounts. In each section, we provide gender comparisons to demonstrate the significant gender parity we uncovered among our participants. We conclude by discussing how social context matters in generating the threat of victimization and why the shadow of sexual assault may be less universal across context than previously assumed.

The Urban Setting and Its Residents as Primary Sources of Risk

Criminologists have highlighted that the threat of victimization is shaped by both physical and social disorder, whether real or perceived. Ecological contamination is then the idea that “all persons encountered in ‘bad’ neighborhoods are viewed as possessing the moral liability of the neighborhood itself” (Sampson and Raudenbush 2004:321). Although our participants all chose to attend SU, their characterizations of the city and its residents clearly indicated that both were at the root of what they experienced as the threat of victimization. As a result, they frequently labeled the city as dangerous, sketchy, shady, ghetto, the projects, blighted, run down, like a jungle, and not the safest place. Eric, a White suburban student, said the city “looks too shady…. I feel like something happens really often, like when I go outside the borders of campus. Because they’re just like the ghetto, kind of. The streets that are around [campus] and all the shops that are around it, they look like really sketchy.” Danica, a Black Latina from a neighboring city, said, “I think [City] is like one of the worst places out there.” Likewise, Jayden, an African American student from a small town, noted having concerns about coming to SU: “You know how everyone perceives [City] as completely and totally dangerous? That was the only thing, I was like, ‘am I gonna get shot?’” Alex, a Latino who grew up in the city, described being “familiar” and “comfortable with the area” but also distinguished campus from the surrounding community:

There is like a barrier, the way I see it. The campus is safe, it’s very safe considering the areas that are around it. I just feel like there is no, like, leaking effect from what happens five blocks away, it doesn’t leak onto campus…. Going up any of these streets, that’s the hood.

Regardless of race/ethnicity or community of origin, and across gender, there was consensus that the city surrounding campus was not safe. Most students knew of the city’s reputation before attending SU, but their perceptions were amplified once they began classes there.

Moreover, students’ characterizations of the city extended to some of its residents, who were described as crackheads, junkies, hobos, bums, gang members, thugs, criminal, drug dealers, derelicts, sketchy, scary, a little unstable, and crazy people. Paz, a Latina from a smaller city in a neighboring state, referred to physical and social disorder when describing areas near campus: “You just see bags of drugs, and you see broken bottles. It just looks terrible. You see people just drunk on the sidewalks and stuff…. [It’s] just the way that it looks, and then kind of like shady people sitting around and watching you.” Rosaria, an international student from a European city, likewise described “sketchy people” in areas around campus, who “either looked under the influence or…approached us asking [for]…money or [to] talk, starting like [a] conversation but it was kind of off.” Amina, a South Asian student, spoke of “people passing comments and asking for money and sometimes cursing at you ‘cause you don’t…give them money.” She continued, “around [City], there are…a lot of people like that.” As an African American, Jayden lamented, “I sound so bourgeoisie,” but characterized his encounters with city residents similarly:

Some people you can tell, like damn, they’re hood…. We were approached by crackheads once (laughs). It wasn’t smart—we walked into the depths and we saw these two thugs walking toward us. We were like, “oh, let’s go back to campus!”

Students most often used racially coded terms, like “crackheads” and “thugs,” to refer to Black city residents (see Omi and Winant 1994) but were occasionally more explicit. Christian, a Latino student, explained: “Nine times out of ten, if you see a black dude, you gotta be on high alert. You just don’t know, you don’t know them.” Alex made this reference more subtly: “I feel like it is the same guy [committing crime] all the time, the way they describe him [in the campus crime alerts].”⁷

Students also drew a sharp contrast between the campus and those they felt belonged there, versus city residents, who were perceived as outsiders with no place on campus. Alex’s reference to barriers and a lack of leaking, Eric’s mention of borders, and Jayden’s account of getting back to campus were echoed in other students’ characterizations of SU as a bubble, your own city, its own little internal part of the city, our own area, very close knit, and a haven. Most notably, nearly all students described SU as pretty or really safe or as safer than other parts of the city.

As a consequence, some students expressed a strong desire to exclude city residents from campus, lamenting that because the campus was open, residents could easily permeate its borders. After transferring from an urban university that was “closed” to community residents, Wayne, an African American student, worried that SU “is just open”:

Prolly the only thing I’m scared of is I don’t like seeing—I’m trying to find what to call ‘em, ‘cause I don’t want to call them what I’m gonna call them—I want to say junkies, but people who look like they’ve had past trouble with drug problems and could be homeless.

Chanté, a Haitian American student from a nearby city, likewise described seeing “people on campus that I just know don’t belong…. Homeless, crackheads. Not harming anyone, but it’s kinda like, why are these people here?” Shaun, an African American student from a large city, also lamented: “Outsiders come into the [campus] library, and they’re not in the place where they probably should be…. They sorta just roam the floor, the grounds, the library floors, they sleep on the desk. So I’m a little uncomfortable with that.” He continued, “maybe I’m selfish. I think it should only be limited to students and faculty members.”

Despite such perceived intrusions, two primary features of SU made students feel safe on campus, with each tied to its characterization as a “bubble” distinct from the larger community. First, students were comforted by the visibility of the campus police who were seen by most as prioritizing students’ safety. Quinn, a White man from a rural community, noted, “just about every time I go out, I’ll see at least one or two cops, so I mean that’s always a good sign that there’s safety on campus when you see a cop every time you go out.” Nikki, an African American woman from SU’s city, also felt safe on campus “because everywhere I turn, there’s a security guard or a police officer. Everywhere.”

Second, our participants emphasized that their fellow students and faculty shared a common educational goal, which enhanced their sense of security on campus. Xavier, a Latino from a nearby suburb, explained, “students, we’re all the same pretty much. We’re all sharing the same space, we’re all doing pretty much the same thing.” Thus, Isabel, a Latina immigrant who grew up in the city, noted, “I feel safe because there’s a lot of people [on campus] that can’t hurt me. Very cute nice people, they’re just students.” Danica, too, explained: “I feel like I’m mostly surrounded by students who are here for the same purpose as me so that makes me feel pretty comfortable…. Mostly surrounding me are students who hold no harm to me or couldn’t pose a harm to me, really.”

Participants also believed students were readily identifiable due to visible markers of their student role. Lucas, a suburban Latino, explained that students have

a book bag if they’re coming out of the library, or holding a book, or paper, or stuff like that. They tend to be maybe a little younger…. I guess it’s kind of like a gut feeling…You just know who’s a student.

And Heather, a White urban student, said “every time I walk around [campus], I see someone with a backpack or someone who looks like a professor. Just people that you don’t get that [dangerous] vibe from.” Participants, then, did not identify other students as sources of potential threat, despite the reality that they typically pose the greatest risk on college campuses (Noonan and Vavra 2007). Combined with campus police who “make sure that you’re safe,” the recognizable presence of students gave our participants a sense of safety on campus. This was a dramatic contrast to their concerns beyond SU’s borders. As Chanté explained, “outside of [SU], it’s a whole new world.”

Gendered Threat of Victimization?

Given students’ characterizations of the city and its African American residents, it is not surprising that they were regularly identified as the primary source of both the cognitive (perceived risk) and emotive (fear) features of the threat of victimization. The contexts and situations that evoked this threat were the same across gender, race/ethnicity, community of origin, and previous experience with victimization. Participants described being most concerned when navigating spaces off campus, particularly at night, by themselves, and/or when they encountered African American men, who appeared suspicious in these contexts.

For example, Isabel explained, “I always feel that in [the city] it’s okay to walk around.” However, she added a temporal dimension to her statement:

This is not an area that is known for the gardens and the flowers, you know? So of course I worry. But not [to the point] that I felt that, oh, three men were walking towards me, or that I have to stop somewhere to distract people. No…. I only feel nervous if for some reason I have to stay so late [on campus], then I worry more. Because then I know I have passed my limitations, that I have added time that I know already I’m not supposed to be walking around [to my car], you know, alone…. Later there’s always more trouble, in the late hours I think.

Lauren, a Latina from a smaller city nearby, who was also not “really like highly concerned” about her safety while attending SU, explained, “I guess I’ve never seen anything that made me like feel that rush that when you’re in danger you feel, like you’re in danger so you try to get away from that situation. I’ve never had that instinct, that, ‘oh my God, something might happen!’” She did, however, describe a night when she had to wait at a nearby bus stop as “probably the scariest thing I’ve done in my life.” When asked what made her feel scared, she explained:

Because it’s dark and you’re alone, and you see people, certain people, walking. They’re males, I guess. It’s kind of like that fear like, ok, I’m all by myself and I gotta watch out…. If something happens, who’s gonna hear? ‘Cause no one is around.

Although accounts like this could be read as gendered, alluding even to the fear of sexual assault, it was robbery Lauren mentioned as her primary crime concern. When asked about gender explicitly, she noted, “I haven’t seen that concentration on gender when crime happens here. Like it could either be a girl or a guy…. If they want to commit a crime, they’ll do it whether you’re a girl or a guy.” Only as an afterthought, with the interviewer’s probe, did she note, “probably depending on rape [there’s a gender difference], because most girls are the ones that get raped, you know.” Likewise, when Isabel was asked what she meant by “trouble” in her account, she explained, “just being robbed, or being mugged. Or having your tires ripped. I don’t know, anything.”

Undergraduate men described similar reactions in similar situations. As a result of the crimes he had heard about on and around campus, combined with his own past victimization experiences, Eric noted, “If I notice that someone is going somewhere I am, but like behind me, then I start to feel shaky like they’re gonna try to rob me or something.” Xavier also described instances of not feeling safe around campus:

If a certain group of people are hanging around and it’s, ya know, [a] more isolated area. They have hoods over their faces…. They’re just standing still. They’re in a tight group, when you pass by sometimes [they] might look at you, or like really, really intently look at you…. That coupled with if you’re walking down a less lighted street, that’s something I kind of avoid.

Xavier elaborated on what it was about hoods that made him apprehensive:

It’s just something I guess I was just predisposed to, like ya know, growing up. It’s “stay away from the guy with the hood,” and ya know, “don’t walk into a store with your hood on, that means you’re trying to hide something.”…If I see a grown adult just standing there with his buddies, with their hoods over, you know, very baggy clothing…[it’s] just that general feeling of “watch out.”

In each of these cases, though participants didn’t explicitly name African American men in their accounts, their narratives nonetheless employed descriptive code words (e.g., certain males, guys with hoods, or wearing baggy clothing), which implied that these were racialized threats (see Omi and Winant 1994).

Where Is the Shadow of Sexual Assault?

Across gender, students were particularly apprehensive in community contexts that exposed them to those men in the city who were perceived as symbols of social disorder and thus the threat of victimization. The threat of rape, however, was notably absent in these accounts. Instead, every participant mentioned robbery, with women’s discussions of this threat occurring in much the same ways and contexts as men’s. Tamara, for example, described being careful when waiting for the bus because there were “a lot of kids” from the local “public school” who “are asking for money and stuff, but they are probably looking to rob you.” Eric’s account was also typical: “[If] I notice that someone is going somewhere I am but like behind me, then I start to feel shaky, like they’re gonna try to rob me or something.”

Danica was the only woman student to provide an account consistent with the shadow of sexual assault: “As a female, people pose a threat to me…they wouldn’t just wanna rob me. I have to worry about people wanting to like assault me and everything, you know, as a female. A guy doesn’t really have to worry about that.” But why was Danica an outlier? What might explain the absence of the fear of rape in other women’s accounts? Our analysis suggests that two microlevel features of college life at SU strongly influenced students’ threat of victimization, focusing their attention specifically on robbery: campus crime alerts and stories of other students’ victimization.

Consider Paz who disclosed experiencing a sexual assault her first year on campus. Her discussions of perceived risk and fear of crime, however, focused heavily on robbery:

For some reason, I do get paranoid around here. So, like at night, so yeah, I do the key thing [i.e., positioning her keys through her fingers as a makeshift weapon]. Oh, [and] sometimes…. I’ll put like my phone and my wallet and just turn it on silent and just put it like in my [waistband] instead of in my pockets. So that way, if somebody tries to rob me, it looks like I don’t have anything on me.

Likewise, describing why she avoided an area adjacent to campus, Paz explained:

I hear a lot about people getting robbed there…[from] the emails [i.e., crime alerts] and stuff…. And then I hear about people getting robbed at [City Boulevard] too…. I know a person who got robbed [at the train station] twice…. She was here by herself at night and she ended up getting robbed and they beat her up pretty bad. I think they broke her ribs.

Paz also mentioned hearing about “a kid [who] went to [the train station] once and he got money out of the ATM and then they followed him I guess. And then when he got to [City Boulevard], they robbed him.”

Campus crime alerts—and the “rumor networks” (Skogan 1987:138) that these and other vicarious victimization incidents spurred—thus helped shape students’ impressions of risk across gender, with references to these sources of information nearly always being about robberies committed by city residents. Amina noted that she and her friends “discuss [crime risks] a lot ‘cause we always get those crime alerts all the time.” Chanté described getting “worried” and “a little scared when I go out” after seeing crime alerts because if “it can happen to anyone, it can happen to me, you know?…. So I do get concerned and I tell my roommate, ‘hey, someone just got robbed, so if we’re going out let’s make sure we…come back early.’” Micah, a multiracial student from a nearby city, said that when he saw his first crime alert,

that definitely was just like, “what did I sign up for?”…. I was just ready to get the hell out of here. Like I would take 19 credits a semester just to get my degree. After every crime alert, I was just like, “I need to get outta here, I need to get outta here.”

Kamal, too, said:

I don’t really think it’s all that safe, mainly ‘cause of the crime reports I got…. It’s not fatally dangerous, meaning I haven’t seen a lot of crimes where people were actually, like their lives were threatened, although there have been strong-arm robberies…. So in terms of safety, I’m only scared of having something stolen from me.

Most participants described learning about crime primarily from campus alerts and the stories shared around campus. Christian was one of the few who mentioned accessing news from other sources: “[City], it’s a crazy place. If you go to [a local news website] and you read about [City], you see…. I remember in the summer, there was a point where [City] had 10 murders in 10 days, and that’s some serious stuff.” Like campus crime alerts, these news stories amplified his perceptions of local danger (see also Weitzer and Kubrin 2004).

This brings us back to Danica, the outlier in our sample, who explicitly referenced the shadow cast by sexual assault. Like Christian, she also referred to specific news stories that clearly shaped her own threat of victimization:

There’s a lot of carjackings that happen out here and that kind of scares me a lot. I have an older half sister…and her dad…always tells us like about everything that goes on, ‘cause he loves the news. And he’s telling me about the carjackings that have been happening, and they’ve been like taking the girls in the car.…it’s getting crazy now, they’re like taking people, like kidnapping them…. It was like some guys that, they, some girls were like stopped at a red light or something, and they carjacked them and then took them and raped them, and then, I don’t know what happened after that. But the moral of the story was they didn’t just kick them out of the car, they like took them with them.

Danica’s articulation of her own gendered fear of victimization was thus framed from her conversations with her sister’s father. What was likely a rare local incident of a carjacking that escalated to kidnapping and rape⁸ became, in her estimation, a common practice—it’s getting crazy now—with a moral of the story that emphasized sexual assault as contemporaneous with other violent street crime in the city.

Despite the overall absence of a shadow of sexual assault, rape was not entirely absent from students’ narratives. However, the topic did not arise spontaneously or as the source of students’ concerns in the urban setting; it was instead elicited by the interviewer’s probes about gender differences in crime risks more generally. In addition to Lauren, Paz, and Danica, who were mentioned previously, one man and two women referenced rape during their interviews. Their accounts emerged specifically from the question of whether they thought risks for victimization were “different for guys versus girls.” Micah observed, “I don’t think there is a difference…. Anybody can get held up with a gun, anybody can get robbed, anybody can get like sexually assaulted. I probably feel like women are more likely to maybe experience sexual assault as well more than men.” Similarly, Rosaria believed “a female would more likely be victimized,” explaining that “a girl…would look weaker, all that stuff, more vulnerable.” Then, she clarified, “Well, mostly I’m talking about sexual assault. Robbery, like even from like the crime alerts, it seems like it varies.” Looking beyond sexual assault, students tended to perceive that women’s risks of being targeted for crime were heightened because, as Isabel said, “It’s easier to dominate [them]”—they wouldn’t be able to match a male perpetrator’s body strength. On the whole, however, we found that the story of students’ threat of victimization in this context was not overwhelmingly gendered.

Discussion

Drawing from qualitative interviews with students attending a university in an urban community, we sought to investigate how contextual characteristics, such as visible disorder and racial threat, might shape the relationships among gender, perceived risk, and fear of crime. Criminological research consistently finds that women’s fear of crime is greater than men’s, with this relationship often explained by the shadow of sexual assault thesis (e.g., Ferraro 1995, 1996; Warr 1984, 1985). Given evidence that racial threat likewise plays a significant role in perceptions of risk and fear of crime, there were compelling reasons to expect that this shadow would be especially pronounced among the undergraduate women in our sample. Instead, it was absent from nearly all of our participants’ accounts, which we suggest may be due to both microlevel and methodological factors. Here, we highlight the contributions of our research, and its implications for the literatures on gender, ecological context, racial threat, and the threat of victimization.

First, our least surprising finding was that students at SU drew on their perceptions of widespread physical and social disorder in the community when defining the threat of victimization. In their descriptions of both the city and its African American residents, students relied on the use of “code words” or “phrases and symbols which refer indirectly to racial themes” (Omi and Winant 1994:123). This was evident in their references to “crackheads,” “thugs,” “guys with hoods” or “baggy clothing,” and “certain males.” Although students didn’t always explicitly name the city’s poor African American men in their remarks, it was apparent that they were the source of their concerns in the urban context.

Further, while there is no doubt that the city where SU was located had high rates of crime and many of its African American residents faced deleterious social conditions, these were heightened in students’ minds by stereotype amplification (Quillian and Pager 2010) and vicarious victimization experiences that they were exposed to via student “rumor networks” (Skogan 1987:138) and campus crime alerts. Campus officials’ decisions to release particular e-mail alerts—incidents in which members of the campus community were robbed by African American male city residents—contributed to how students perceived the city, its residents, and the threat they posed, especially when encountered off campus, when alone, and/or after dark. That is, across students’ diverse background characteristics—including gender, race/ethnicity, community and country of origin, and previous victimization experience—all conceptualized threat in a similar way due to the disadvantaged urban context that they found themselves within. The resulting ecological contamination did not extend to the university or its faculty and students who were defined as safe and harmless because of their shared educational purpose. Students’ trust in other students, coupled with their positive relationships with campus police, contributed to their perceptions of the campus as a “security bubble” that was insulated from the dangers, real and perceived, lurking outside its borders.

Second, perhaps our most significant contribution is that the gendered shadow of sexual assault may not be as universal across context as previous research suggests. Undergraduate men at SU articulated—at least as much as undergraduate women—both deep concern and moments of fear in navigating the city surrounding campus. Given that they defined robbery as the number one crime risk, followed by physical assault, in some ways, this is not surprising: Controlling for fear of rape, many studies find that men’s fear of these crimes is equal to or greater than that of women’s (Dobbs et al. 2009; Ferraro 1996). Thus, most striking in our analysis was the near absence of women expressing fear or perceived risk of sexual assault. Just one participant described her fear of rape shadowing her fear of other crime, and any other mentions of sexual assault occurred infrequently, generically, and almost always after a gender-specific prompt by the interviewer.

We suggest that microlevel context shapes how racial threat contributes to perceptions of disorder and risk, as well as the presence, nature, and strength of the shadow of sexual assault. Ecologically focused research highlights that fear and perceived risk are heightened for women as a result of their daily experiences with men in the public and private spheres, including routine sexual harassment and sexualized interactions (MacMillan, Nierobisz, and Welsh 2000; Madriz 1997). In contrast, daily routines at SU were organized around the more gender-neutral activities of nonresidential college life: Students came to take classes and study but their social lives were oriented elsewhere, and this was true for both commuters and those who resided on campus. The university setting thus appeared to be one in which gender was not central to participants’ interactions and identities as college students. This lessened the salience of gender (see Thorne 1993) in the threat of victimization, with participants believing that being surrounded by individuals with a shared educational purpose would protect them from crime on campus. Further, campus crime alerts, along with the routine sharing of personal and vicarious stories of students being robbed, appeared to considerably diminish women’s fear of rape and increase their fear of robbery.

Finally, it may be that distinct pictures of fear and perceived risk emerge from different methodological approaches, with this explaining why our findings diverge from survey research on college campuses (see Fisher and Sloan 2003; Lane et al. 2009). Perhaps women were simply unwilling to explicitly name their fear of rape in the context of face-to-face interviews. While we cannot discount this explanation, we also don’t see compelling evidence for it, given how thoroughly our interviews covered a range of topics related to fear and perceived risk—and how much our participants had to say on these subjects. Consistent with open-ended qualitative research strategies, we intentionally began our interviews with general questions about students’ daily routines and leisure time, before turning to global questions about perceived risk and fear and asking gender-specific follow-ups. We took this approach so students could discuss those perceptions, feelings, and experiences they identified as most important (see Charmaz 2012; Miller 2011). In doing so, we discovered that students’ perceptions of risk on and around campus were specific to the urban setting and did not appear to carry over to other contexts that students were familiar with.

Overall, participants tended to think about the threat of victimization from their general position as college students in an urban setting; however, the introduction of gendered prompts tended to increase the salience of gender in their accounts. Even then, students’ conversations around gender focused more on cultural messages about women as weak and vulnerable than they did on sexual assault specifically. Thus, it may be that survey research on women’s fear and perceived risk—which has shifted from the use of global questions that ask about many crimes simultaneously to more crime-specific measures (Ferraro and LaGrange 1987)—primes participants to forefront gender and sexual assault in ways they might not otherwise, subsequently producing an overestimation of the shadow of sexual assault.

This is not to say that the shadow thesis cannot explain women’s fear on campus or in urban settings. Rather, all contexts have unique characteristics that distinguish them from one another and influence individuals’ perceptions of risk and fear of crime. A central limitation of this research is that our findings are drawn from a relatively small sample of students attending one urban university at which the theory does not hold. Despite this, theoretical saturation was achieved during data collection, a goal Charmaz (2012) argues should be privileged in qualitative research over any focus on sample size. Future qualitative studies on this topic should seek to compare these findings from SU with those of universities located in similar urban contexts, particularly with regard to concentrated disadvantage and rates of violent crime. Such research would be useful in gaining a better understanding about how and why gendered fear of crime might vary across microlevel contexts, and how methodological strategies might evoke or downplay the salience of gender and sexual assault among participants. We found ample evidence of the threat of victimization among both women and men, shaped by the information they received about crime and stereotype amplification processes that heightened racial threat in ecologically “contaminated” spaces. The shadow of sexual assault, however, was largely an absent component of this threat.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Shannon K. Jacobsen

Notes

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