"Haunted By A Shadow":The Effect Of Sexual Assault Anxious To Female Collage Students' Fear Of Crime

Research on the fear of crime has always occupied a major position in criminology.Among them,foreign countries have paid considerable attention to crimes on campus and carried out enormous investigations and research on this basis.However,in China,crime problem in school once lacked public attention,with the increasing frequency of crimes(e.g.,school bullying and property crime)in recent years,it is gradually breaking the conventional understanding of school for safety and reliability.It is well known that the sex factor is regarded as an important predictor to correspond to different levels of fear of crime.What we can generally feel in daily life is that female will feedback higher degree of fear than male.A popular explanation for the sex difference in fear of crime is the hypothesis of "the shadow of sexual assault"put forward by Kenneth F.Ferraro,American criminologist,who believes that female's fear of sexual assault affected their fear of other types of crime.This thesis focuses on the fear of crime on different levels.Based on the survey data from a questionnaire survey of 350 campus students in Nanjing University,Ferraro's hypothesis model has been duplicated and refined to understand the sex difference in fear of crime amongst college student population.Also,"the shadow of sexual assault" hypothesis has been tested to verify its predictive power on the fear of crime for Chinese college students,and explore the factors that can predict the fear of sexual assault by female of different genders.Finally,describe the specific situations which may leads to the higher level of the fear of crime in campus.The hypothesis testing indicts that there is a clear sex difference in fear of crime amongst Chinese college students.Among them,female students show higher levels of fear of crime than their male counterparts on campus.Female college students'concerns about sexual assault are "hidden" in other types of crimes,especially the types of crimes that involve face-to-face contact with offenders,have further affected their fear of crime.The severity of crime which regarded by college students can be used as a consistent factor to predict their fear of crime.The research significance of this thesis lies in the study from the perspective of sex,which investigates the sex difference in the level of fear of crime for college students.It aims to reinforce the relevant qualitative research on this topic with quantitative data analysis.The specific results describe the possible security problems in the new campus environment.By understanding the differences in college students'fear of crime,we might find universal measures that can reduce the fears.Finally,we conclude the environmental characteristics that can cause fear of crime in the campus and discuss the reasons,and constructively put forward some suggestions.