Women students’ perceptions of crime and safety: negotiating fear and risk in an English post-industrial landscape

Abstract

CitationWattis, L., Green, E. E. and Radford, J. (2011) This paper explores safety concerns and fear of crime amongst women students attending university in a large town in the north-east of England. It acknowledges that gender as a social category is problematic; however, the paper is grounded in recognition of its significance in shaping experiences of fear, safety and space. The main aim is to explore how gender intersects with student identity/ies in a specific local context.The paper draws upon qualitative data from doctoral research which explored the crime and fear experiences of women students studying in a town bearing all of the hallmarks of industrial decline. It evidences powerful representations of place with respondents drawing heavily on the town's working-class culture and deindustrialisation in their reading of the locale. In addition, respondents linked the town unequivocally to crime and disorder, and identified the criminal threat as originating from local people. In this way, fears were frequently locally focused, linking to a fear of place and the risks associated with the student identity. This highlights that women's fears and spatial negotiation cannot be read exclusively in terms of gender -in this context they are frequently shaped by 'studenthood' and the dynamics of class and locality. At the same time however, the paper reveals how the local intersects with gender to shape experiences of space, fear and safety, as well as the transformative effects of ethnicity at its intersection with gender, locality and the student identity.Keywords: Identity; students; safety; fear; local context. IntroductionThis article explores women's fears as students in a post-industrial, urban locality where crime and disorder were highly visible features of the social landscape. It is underpinned by a recognition of the salience of gender 1 in shaping women's experiences of space, fear and safety. These themes have been covered extensively in feminist literature and research which focuses on how gender structures, sexual violence, harassment, ideology and discourses of victimisation perpetuate fears and render public space differential and problematic for women (Gordon et al.

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“…Thus, fear is not merely a direct response to actual violence but the result of the social production of women's vulnerability. Women's fears differ from men's (Pain 2001) but it is also experienced differently amongst women (Pain 2001;Wattis, Green, and Radford 2011). Moreover, visibility is also a relevant factor when studying young women and public space.…”

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“…However, other places fail to recover from the decimation of their traditional industries, which dominated physical landscapes, as well as economic and social life (Apel, 2015; Hall et al, 2008; Winlow, 2002). In these locales, past and present combine in physical and social space where the ‘ghosts’ of former industries retain a strong presence (Edensor, 2008; Nayak, 2006; Wattis el al., 2011). Edensor’s (2008) exploration of the spatialisation of memory and former industrial landscapes highlights how the redundant and discarded liminal spaces of industrial sites resist erasure to become an alternative ‘site of memory’.…”

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