The DOI matches its OpenAlex record.
Women's Fear of Victimization: Shadow of Sexual Assault?
Abstract
This article considers the thesis that sexual assault may operate as a master offense among women, heightening their fear of other victimizations. Measures of fear and perceived risk of victimization from a national survey of adults are used to examine the “shadow” hypothesis across nine separate offenses. Fear of sexual assault substantially increases the explained variance in fear of personal crime, eliminating or reversing the gender difference. Fear of sexual assault also influences fear of property offenses, but its effect is smaller than for personal crimes. The results show that women are more afraid of all victimizations, but this is principally due to their perceived risk of such offenses and their fear of rape in everyday life.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Yodanis, C. L. (2004) · Journal of Interpersonal Violence · doi:10.1177/0886260504263868 · Cited by 387
Fear of crime and criminal victimization: Gender-based contrasts
Schafer, J. A., Huebner, B. M., & Bynum, T. S. (2006) · Journal of Criminal Justice · doi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2006.03.003 · Cited by 340
The Relationship between Rape Myths and Sexual Scripts: The Social Construction of Rape
Ryan, K. M. (2011) · Sex Roles · doi:10.1007/s11199-011-0033-2 · Cited by 260
Experiencing the streets: Harassment and perceptions of safety among women
MACMILLAN, R., NIEROBISZ, A., & WELSH, S. (2000) · Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency · doi:10.1177/0022427800037003003 · Cited by 238
Shechory-Bitton, M., & Cohen-Louck, K. (2018) · International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology · doi:10.1177/0306624x16658472 · Cited by 41
Metadata
- Authors
- Ferraro, K. F.
- Venue
- Social Forces
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Published
- 1996-12-01
- Volume
- 75
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 667-667
- ISSN
- 0037-7732 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1968026587
- Cited by
- 609
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 4.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Women's Fear of Victimization: Shadow of Sexual Assault? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/sf/75.2.667
- The paper
- Ferraro, K. F. (1996). Women's Fear of Victimization: Shadow of Sexual Assault? Social Forces. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/75.2.667
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
