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SOCIAL JUSTICE: A Scotland where EVERYONE matters: Indicators of Progress

Milestone 23 : Reducing the fear of crime among older people

Indicator

This milestone is measured by 3 indicators. The information is taken from the Scottish Crime Survey which is run by the Scottish Executive. The indicators cover fear of being a victim of housebreaking, the fear of physical assault on the street and fear of being a victim of car theft. In each case the recorded figure is for those people aged 60 or more who expressed a view that they were ‘very worried’ about being a victim of the given crime. Information is also provided from the Scottish Crime Survey 2000 on the effect that ‘a fear of crime’ is having on the quality of life of older people.

Availability of data

Information for this milestone is available at the Scottish level. Owing to the sample size it is not possible to provide a regional breakdown. It is also not possible to give information by ethnicity, but the data can be broken down by gender and from the 2000 survey the information can be broken down by disability.

Fear of crime

Chart 23a shows that the percentage of people aged 60 or more who were very worried about being a victim of housebreaking has decreased over the course of the 1990s. It is also clear that during the time period measured women felt more concerned about housebreaking than men. Chart 23b shows that the percentage of people aged 60 or more who were very worried about physical assault on the street also decreased over the course of the 1990s. As in the case of housebreaking, women were more worried about becoming a victim of physical assault on the street than men.

Chart 23a : Housebreaking	Chart 23b : Physical assault on the street

Source : Scottish Crime Survey : Scottish Executive

Chart 23c shows that the percentage of people aged 60 or more who were very worried about being a victim of car theft fell slightly during the 1990s. Whilst women were again more worried than men about being a victim of car theft, the difference between the sexes was not as pronounced as in the other two areas of crime highlighted above.

Chart 23c : Car theft

Source : Scottish Crime Survey : Scottish Executive

It should be noted that the information available for 1988 only covers Central and Southern Scotland whereas the 1993, 1996 and 2000 data covers all of Scotland.

The 2000 survey included some additional information on how people’s fear of crime was effected by their standard of health. The information given in table 23d suggests that those people aged 60 or over who had limiting health problems were twice as likely to be "very worried" about becoming a victim of crime than those people aged 60 or over who did not have a limiting health problem.

Table 23d : Worry about specific types of crime by long standing health problems for those aged 60 and over

Source : Scottish Crime Survey : Scottish Executive

The Scottish Crime Survey 2000 also asked respondents to assess the effect that fear of crime had on their quality of life. Table 23e shows that just under 2 % of males aged 60 or more considered that a fear of crime had a great effect on their quality of life, this compares to just under 6 % of women aged 60 or over.

Table 23e : The effect that fear of crime has on the quality of life of those aged 60 and over

Source : Scottish Crime Survey : Scottish Executive

Only 4.1 % of people aged 60 and over said that fear of crime had a great effect on their quality of life (this compares with 3.8 % for the whole sample). 10 % of those with limiting health problems felt that fear of crime had a great effect on their quality of life, compared with only 2.3 % of those with no health problems and 2.2 % of those with non-limiting health problems.

Background data

The following table gives the percentage of older people who were ‘very worried’ about being a victim of housebreaking.

Table 23f : Fear of housebreaking

Source : Scottish Crime Survey : Scottish Executive

The following table gives the percentage of older people who were ‘very worried’ about being a victim of physical assault on the street.

Table 23g : Fear of physical assault on the street

Source : Scottish Crime Survey : Scottish Executive

The following table gives the percentage of older people who were ‘very worried’ about being a victim of car theft.

Table 23h: Fear of car theft

Source : Scottish Crime Survey : Scottish Executive

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