Nothing Bad Happens to Good Girls: Fear of Crime in Women's Lives

• NCJ Number: 173513
• Author(s): E Madriz
• Date Published: 1997
• Length: 202 pages
• Sale Source: University of California Press
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This volume analyzes how women in the United States perceive the threat of crime in their everyday lives and how that perception controls their behavior.

Abstract

One of the major purposes of the book was to encourage readers to be more critically aware of their beliefs and behaviors in confronting fear of crime, to be aware of social contexts and institutions that permanently reproduce relations of dominance and subordination. The book drew on focus groups, and in-depth interviews with diverse groups of women. It demonstrates how women's fear of crime perpetuates gender inequalities and contributes to the social control of women, particularly poor African-American and Latina women, keeping them in subservient and self-limiting social positions. The book contains the following chapters: (1) The Context of Fear of Crime; (2) The Manufacture of a Good Girl; (3) Fear of Crime as Social Control; (4) Innocent and Culpable Victims; (5) The Creation of Outlaws; (6) Coping With Fear; and (7) Confronting Fears. Tables, references, index