Fear of Crime Survey…now what? - July 2010

The idea of this session was to look at the responses we had and to see if there were any interesting patterns. We did this by looking at everyone’s answers in different ways, such as responses from different age groups, or looking to see if there were any differences between male and female responses – its technical term is data analysis.

So how exactly did we do this data analysis? From all the questions we asked in the survey we focused on two to begin with, these were:

• Overall, how worried are you about witnessing crime?
• In general, how worried are you about being a victim of crime?

We made two groups and each group had to look at one of the questions. For their question the group had to see if there were any differences in responses from different genders or ages.

So what did they find out and what were their thoughts on the results?

Overall, how worried are you about witnessing crime?

• Females are overall 18% more fairly worried than males 
• It’s quite close to 50:50 on those that are very or fairly worried those that aren’t.
• More people are fairly worried, 37% they are fairly worried compared to 3% more than not very worried
• We expected boys to be less worried, Why? Perhaps because women are more vulnerable
• Do they know what crime is? What do they classify as a crime?

In general how worried are you about being a victim of crime

• Over 60% are very or fairly worried
• Females are more fearful o f being a victim of crime
• Younger people tend to be more worried, getting less worried as they get older.
• Perhaps young children know less about what is going on so they are more worried about the unknown.
• It’s clear everyone has an opinion on crime as only one person put that they didn’t know.

After looking at all the respondents for both questions they had the following thoughts

• They should group the people who responded as very worried with those who responded as fairly worried into one. That way they can say, for example, that 60% of respondents are very or fairly worried about being a victim of crime – it gives people a better idea of the situation than 30% are very worried and 30% are fairly worried.
• The results prove our hypothesis – that many respondents are worried about crime.
• All people have an opinion of youth crime, so it is an issue on everyone’s mind.

What are the problems in your area?

Before getting onto the open question, we ran through the responses to a question that asked people what they identified as a problem in their local areas, with a majority Strongly Agreeing or Agreeing with these statements:

• Groups of people hanging around on the streets (64%)
• Rubbish/Litter lying around (63%)
• People using or dealing drugs (50%)
• People being drunk or rowdy in public places (57%)
• People being bullied (58%)
• People being beaten up (52%)

The below show where a majority felt that these were not issues in their local area:

• Noisy neighbours or loud parties (61%)
• Vandalism/graffiti (50%)
• Damage to property/vehicles (54%)
• Street robbery/mugging (54%)

An open question is one which allows you to give your own answer (rather then choosing one) and gives you the chance to answer in detail. We got a lot of responses on our open questions in this survey so what we now had to do was to group them to get an idea of what was concerning young people.

To get a better understanding of grouping things we Louca-Mai had a fun task involving chocolate! Each group got a box of Quality Street chocolates and they were told to sort the sweets in to no more that 5 different groups. Working as a team, they had to complete this within 5 minutes and explain why they have chosen each group. What it showed us is that there are a number of ways you can group things and that we need to carefully consider how we group our response.

Here are the final groupings following this exercise: Results, three key messages of what is being suggested.

So we have now looked at all the responses and grouped together the detailed open questions and now we looked at what young people thought would improve the situation. There were many suggestions, and again we needed to group them together so we could form the following summary of what young children and young people believe are the answers to reducing the fear of crime:

• More active police on the streets, particularly at night
• Stop negative media, it makes it seem like crime is everywhere
• Environment – More street lights
• Closer communities working together

Next Steps – So we have out results, who do we get in touch with now?

At NCB’s summer reception we had to think of a pledge to get people to support one of our priorities. As there will be lots of senior people there and government ministers, it was an opportunity to get support from some really important people, here were your suggestions:

• Children & Young People shouldn’t have to fear crime in their everyday lives
• And here are the images we took for our final pledge of Children & Young People have the right to feel safe from crime
• I believe that young people should not be prejudiced against other people
• I believe every young person should have the right to live their life fully without the fear of crime impeding their lives
• more positive stories should be written about C&YP in the media
• Young People should not have to fear crime
• % (taken from our survey results) of young people shouldn’t’ have to fear crime
• Crime is fear, fear is weakness And here are the images we took for our final pledge of “Children & Young People have the right to feel safe from crime”: