The Psychology of Fear

What happens when the fear of crime interrupts your daily life? Stacy Moreland, Tamsin Green and Sarah Cohen explore how fear affects residents and their families.

Maybe a curious shadow sweeps across the window. Maybe a peculiar noise echoes in the dark. At night our subconscious minds are left to wonder “What if?” while an endless newsreel of South Africa’s latest crime statistics plays relentlessly in our heads. Clearly how safe we are has nothing to do with how safe we feel.
Deon Bovey, has lived in Oatland’s North for two years, says; “this is modern life, a Neighbourhood Watch could work, but everyone keeps too much to themselves, that’s just the way it is”. We have retreated to our domestic fortresses where varying levels of paranoia incite us to build higher walls around our families, leaving our neighbours to do the same.

The need to insulate ourselves against a crime-caused fear has little to do with a reduction in actual criminal activity. The South African Stress and Health Survey found in 2008 that a third of our population will experience some form of violence in our lifetime. However Samantha Fox, who is currently completing her Masters in Counselling Psychology specialising in trauma counselling, says that we can all suffer from “vicarious victimisation”. We live immersed in negative media, horrifying statistics and gruesome images. In this environment empathy often makes us feel subconsciously victimised even when we ourselves are not the victims of crime. Without our knowledge we adopt a state of hyper-vigilance, ready to respond instinctively by ‘fight or flight’. Simply; we live in fear.
Neighbours Wayne Rathbone and Richard MacNally live metres apart, yet they adopt very different approaches to the fear of potential attack. But both are certain that they feel absolutely safe and secure. Evidently ‘safety’ is as much a state of mind as a reality.

The Rathbones adopt a free-spirited approach; “we’ve been known to go to sleep with our keys still in the outside of our front door”. The minor incidents of theft they’ve experienced they attribute to their own carelessness, such as the loss of a ladder left in the front yard or entry via a window left wide open to allow newly varnished floors to dry. “The location,” they say, “that’s where the real crime is”.

While the Rathbone’s relaxed attitude keeps them feeling secure Richard MacNally has reacted to threats by intruder-proofing his property, even throwing the odd firecracker to scare off “kids messing around”. The MacNallys feel safe because they are actively protecting themselves. “I manage our security here… we’ve been here for 6 years now and not one problem”.

Our homes should be places of refuge, where we can recuperate from the stresses beyond their walls. Yet despite our best attempts to protect ourselves we cannot always be successful. In June this year Ann Pott’s 17 year old daughter was mugged. In her wallet was her home address and (coincidentally?) since then their family home in Espin Drive has been targeted by criminals on numerous occasions. Random violent acts such as a brick thrown through window have left the family living in constant fear. “I think they have a personal vendetta against us,” says Ann. Her 13 year old daughter has become so traumatised by the constant fear that she cannot fall asleep without her mother watching over her every night.

Stress is a natural response – an evolutionary tool that gives us the adrenaline rush required to evade, fight and survive. But are bodies and minds cannot cope with constant stress and the repercussions of post-traumatic stress should not be underestimated. Samantha Fox says that while Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is fairly rare everyone experiences some of the symptoms of PTSD when faced with violence in their own homes. She likens the human memory to a cupboard; “when you have a traumatic experience, that memory is just thrown into the cupboard, you don’t have time to order and arrange it, parts might get lost”. The ‘lost parts’ of a traumatic experience often emerge as nightmares, flashbacks or intrusive thoughts. Every individual is different but difficulty concentrating, irritability, disturbed sleep and emotional ‘numbness’ my all be signs that a friend or family member is not coping with their traumatic experience.

When faced with a situation like this Samantha suggests that the most important thing is to “create an environment of social support - where adults can talk it out and children can play it out”. Parents should consider making a visible reassuring change to the security in or around their home. Children don’t necessarily need to feel that their house is impenetrable, but rather a sense of “that was then, this is now” which allows them to ‘let go’ of traumatic memories.

Clearly neighbours aren’t just the people who live on either side of us and home isn’t only behind our garden gate. ‘Living in fear’ is a phenomenon which shows that when crime touches one of us, it affects all of us.