IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/soinre/v154y2021i3d10.1007_s11205-020-02545-y.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Determinants of the Fear of Crime in Argentina and Brazil: A Cross-Country Comparison of Non-Criminal and Environmental Factors Affecting Feelings of Insecurity

Author

Listed:
  • Riccardo Valente

    (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)

  • Mattia Vacchiano

    (University of Lausanne
    Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES)

Abstract

Argentina and Brazil report the highest incidence of the fear of crime across Latin America. Although the spread of crime and victimization may explain these trends initially, the focus in this paper is on the significance of non-criminal factors in explaining the fear of crime, such as socio-economic vulnerability, educational level and trust in people and institutions, as well as exposure to violence at one’s place of residence. Using a subset of data from the 2017 edition of the Latinobarómetro survey (n = 2400), a regression analysis was conducted showing that the fear of crime is radically different between the two countries. In Argentina, as in certain European countries, people’s fears of crime are positively associated with socio-economic vulnerability and in turn negatively associated with state-driven violence. The latter has a protective effect on Argentinians’ feelings of insecurity, while in Brazil the fear of crime is to a greater extent a consequence of previous victimization and a general distrust in other people. Despite this key difference, our results shed light on the problem of social cohesion in both countries, suggesting that the fear of crime is a social rather than criminal issue.

Suggested Citation

  • Riccardo Valente & Mattia Vacchiano, 2021. "Determinants of the Fear of Crime in Argentina and Brazil: A Cross-Country Comparison of Non-Criminal and Environmental Factors Affecting Feelings of Insecurity," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 154(3), pages 1077-1096, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:soinre:v:154:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s11205-020-02545-y
    DOI: 10.1007/s11205-020-02545-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-020-02545-y
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11205-020-02545-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Luisa Blanco & Isabel Ruiz, 2013. "The Impact of Crime and Insecurity on Trust in Democracy and Institutions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(3), pages 284-288, May.
    2. Swatt, Marc L. & Varano, Sean P. & Uchida, Craig D. & Solomon, Shellie E., 2013. "Fear of crime, incivilities, and collective efficacy in four Miami neighborhoods," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 1-11.
    3. Maris, Lesbia & Ortega, Daniel, 2014. "Crime Perceptions and Reality in Latin America," Research Department working papers 255, CAF Development Bank Of Latinamerica.
    4. Rafael Prieto Curiel & Steven Richard Bishop, 2018. "Fear of crime: the impact of different distributions of victimisation," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 4(1), pages 1-8, December.
    5. Scarborough, Brittney K. & Like-Haislip, Toya Z. & Novak, Kenneth J. & Lucas, Wayne L. & Alarid, Leanne F., 2010. "Assessing the relationship between individual characteristics, neighborhood context, and fear of crime," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 819-826, July.
    6. Bates, Douglas & Mächler, Martin & Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve, 2015. "Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 67(i01).
    7. Heisig, Jan Paul & Schaeffer, Merlin, 2019. "Why You Should Always Include a Random Slope for the Lower-Level Variable Involved in a Cross-Level Interaction," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 35(2), pages 258-279.
    8. Silvia Russo & Michele Roccato & Alessio Vieno, 2013. "Criminal Victimization and Crime Risk Perception: A Multilevel Longitudinal Study," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 112(3), pages 535-548, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aldenis Vásquez & Rafael Alvarado & Brayan Tillaguango & Cem Işık & Muntasir Murshed, 2023. "Impact of Social and Institutional Indicators on the Homicide Rate in Ecuador: An Analysis Using Advanced Time Series Techniques," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 169(1), pages 1-22, September.
    2. Jakub Lickiewicz & Patricia Paulsen Hughes & Marta Makara-Studzińska, 2023. "Fear of Crime, Perceived Risk, and Confidence About Dangerous Situations Among University Women in the United States and Poland," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(4), pages 21582440231, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kuen, Kiseong & Weisburd, David & White, Clair & Hinkle, Joshua C., 2022. "Examining impacts of street characteristics on residents' fear of crime: Evidence from a longitudinal study of crime hot spots," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    2. Jeong, Tay, 2022. "Contextual fallacy in MLMs with cross-level interaction: A critical review of neighborhood effects on psychiatric resilience," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 310(C).
    3. JANSSENS, Jochen & DE CORTE, Annelies & SÖRENSEN, Kenneth, 2016. "Water distribution network design optimisation with respect to reliability," Working Papers 2016007, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    4. Raymond Hernandez & Elizabeth A. Pyatak & Cheryl L. P. Vigen & Haomiao Jin & Stefan Schneider & Donna Spruijt-Metz & Shawn C. Roll, 2021. "Understanding Worker Well-Being Relative to High-Workload and Recovery Activities across a Whole Day: Pilot Testing an Ecological Momentary Assessment Technique," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(19), pages 1-17, October.
    5. Elisabeth Beckmann & Lukas Olbrich & Joseph Sakshaug, 2024. "Multivariate assessment of interviewer-related errors in a cross-national economic survey (Lukas Olbrich, Elisabeth Beckmann, Joseph W. Sakshaug)," Working Papers 253, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank).
    6. Valentina Krenz & Arjen Alink & Tobias Sommer & Benno Roozendaal & Lars Schwabe, 2023. "Time-dependent memory transformation in hippocampus and neocortex is semantic in nature," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-17, December.
    7. Morán-Ordóñez, Alejandra & Ameztegui, Aitor & De Cáceres, Miquel & de-Miguel, Sergio & Lefèvre, François & Brotons, Lluís & Coll, Lluís, 2020. "Future trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services in Mediterranean forests under global change scenarios," Ecosystem Services, Elsevier, vol. 45(C).
    8. Damian M. Herz & Manuel Bange & Gabriel Gonzalez-Escamilla & Miriam Auer & Keyoumars Ashkan & Petra Fischer & Huiling Tan & Rafal Bogacz & Muthuraman Muthuraman & Sergiu Groppa & Peter Brown, 2022. "Dynamic control of decision and movement speed in the human basal ganglia," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-15, December.
    9. Dongyan Liu & Chongran Zhou & John K. Keesing & Oscar Serrano & Axel Werner & Yin Fang & Yingjun Chen & Pere Masque & Janine Kinloch & Aleksey Sadekov & Yan Du, 2022. "Wildfires enhance phytoplankton production in tropical oceans," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-9, December.
    10. Ceron, Francisco I. & Bol, Thijs & van de Werfhorst, Herman G., 2022. "The dynamics of achievement inequality: The role of performance and choice in Chile," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    11. Zhaogeng Yang & Yanhui Li & Peijin Hu & Jun Ma & Yi Song, 2020. "Prevalence of Anemia and its Associated Factors among Chinese 9-, 12-, and 14-Year-Old Children: Results from 2014 Chinese National Survey on Students Constitution and Health," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(5), pages 1-10, February.
    12. Baomin Dong & Peter H Egger & Yibei Guo, 2020. "Is poverty the mother of crime? Evidence from homicide rates in China," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(5), pages 1-22, May.
    13. Marco Lopez-Cruz & Fernando M. Aguate & Jacob D. Washburn & Natalia Leon & Shawn M. Kaeppler & Dayane Cristina Lima & Ruijuan Tan & Addie Thompson & Laurence Willard Bretonne & Gustavo los Campos, 2023. "Leveraging data from the Genomes-to-Fields Initiative to investigate genotype-by-environment interactions in maize in North America," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-14, December.
    14. Baumann, Elias & Kern, Jana & Lessmann, Stefan, 2019. "Usage Continuance in Software-as-a-Service," IRTG 1792 Discussion Papers 2019-005, Humboldt University of Berlin, International Research Training Group 1792 "High Dimensional Nonstationary Time Series".
    15. repec:cup:judgdm:v:16:y:2021:i:1:p:201-237 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. C. Gabriel Hidalgo Pizango & Eurídice N. Honorio Coronado & Jhon del Águila-Pasquel & Gerardo Flores Llampazo & Johan de Jong & César J. Córdova Oroche & José M. Reyna Huaymacari & Steve J. Carver & D, 2022. "Sustainable palm fruit harvesting as a pathway to conserve Amazon peatland forests," Nature Sustainability, Nature, vol. 5(6), pages 479-487, June.
    17. Szefer Elena & Lu Donghuan & Nathoo Farouk & Beg Mirza Faisal & Graham Jinko, 2017. "Multivariate association between single-nucleotide polymorphisms in Alzgene linkage regions and structural changes in the brain: discovery, refinement and validation," Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology, De Gruyter, vol. 16(5-6), pages 367-386, December.
    18. Julien Collet & Samantha C Patrick & Henri Weimerskirch, 2017. "A comparative analysis of the behavioral response to fishing boats in two albatross species," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 28(5), pages 1337-1347.
    19. Sean Coogan & Zhixian Sui & David Raubenheimer, 2018. "Gluttony and guilt: monthly trends in internet search query data are comparable with national-level energy intake and dieting behavior," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 4(1), pages 1-9, December.
    20. Darcy Steeg Morris & Kimberly F. Sellers, 2022. "A Flexible Mixed Model for Clustered Count Data," Stats, MDPI, vol. 5(1), pages 1-18, January.
    21. Katrijn Delaruelle, 2023. "Migration-related inequalities in loneliness across age groups: a cross-national comparative study in Europe," European Journal of Ageing, Springer, vol. 20(1), pages 1-17, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:soinre:v:154:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s11205-020-02545-y. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.