Keeping Up Appearances: Profiting from Patriarchy in the Nation\u27s \u27Safest\u27 City

This paper explores the history and the political and economic dividends of manipulating urban crime data. It demonstrates data manipulation as an historic and widely practiced method of safety construction in cities and discusses why rape is a crime especially prone to statistical corruption. Insofar as hiding rape makes a city appear to be safer than it actually is, I argue that the practice has taken on greater political and economic significance in this era of mobile capital and interurban competition. I explore these themes in a case study from Philadelphia and I discuss the many contradictions that it points to. Patriarchy, I conclude, is a tool of economic development that puts all urban women at risk

A Geography of Men\u27s Fear

Men are at significantly greater risk than women to violent crime victimization in the U.S., especially in the public sphere. Despite this, their fears and vulnerabilities have received considerably less attention in recent social discourse than have women. Men’s risk in and fear of public space is overshadowed by their apparent fearlessness in public space. This paper begins to address this apparent paradox using the conceptual lenses of masculinity and control. I explore fear and fearlessness among men as objects and subjects of masculinity. Stated fearlessness among men is counterbalanced by a chronic fear of violent crime victimization. Conditioned fearlessness combines with actual risk and chronic fear to shape men’s experiences in the public sphere. I study the dynamics of men’s fear using data gathered from a group of young men and women in Philadelphia. Gendered differences in fear and how environments are perceived and judged as to their relative safety are demonstrated and explored. Compared to women’s fears and perceived geographical vulnerabilities, the men of this study demonstrate a persistent and chronic wariness of their environmental context that precedes any judgment of perceived safety. Violence and fear among both men and women in this study is further explained as a function of racism and economic marginalization

An Archaeology of Fear and Environmental Change in Philadelphia

This paper examines how mechanisms of social control function to mediate human-environment relations and processes of environmental change in the city. Using the Fairmount Park System of Philadelphia as a case study, I argue that a history of social control mechanisms, both formal and informal, maintained viable socio-environmental urban relationships. Their decline over the last several decades has produced a legacy of fear towards the city’s natural environment that has had, and continues to have, profound socio-spatial and ecological implications. I argue that these changes have their origin in a set of racially motivated decisions made during the volatile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s and that African American women, in particular, have been impacted disproportionately by their consequences. Fear of crime in the natural environment and suspicion of environmental change have resulted in the exclusion of local women and children from what was, historically, a politically and socially viable public space. In this context, urban ecological change is locally understood as more an issue of social control issue than one of environmental concern