Lectures / 16/02/2009 7:30 pm

Social security and crime-related anxiety. Can social policies protect against a sense of crime-related insecurity?

It has been shown that crime-related anxiety is increasingly frequently a projection of social and existential fears. Criminality serves in these cases as a metaphor for diffuse feelings of insecurity that cannot be articulated as such. This fact has a great number of implications for the actions that a society implements in the areas of security and the installation of a safety net against social risks. It is obvious that such an insight discredits for instance attempts to legitimize repressive criminological interventions by the state to enhance its citizens’ sense of security. There are on the other hand potentially successful options in terms of institutional¬ised safeguards against social and existential risks that result from the upheavals in Europe’s contemporary societies.
Using transnational data from the European Social Survey 2004/2005, Professor Hirten¬lehner will be addressing the question to what extent there is an interrelation between social security and the intensity of crime-related anxiety. As will be demonstrated in several analyses, it is possible to reduce anxiety by introducing elements of social safeguarding.