'Better safe than sorry, but, you know, don't overdo it' responsabilization and fatalism in perception of safety

Abstract

The slogan ‘Better Safe than Sorry, But You Know, Don’t Overdo It’ is inspired by a column written by Melissa Summers about ‘National Baby Safety Month’ (2007). In a cynical but funny manner Summers criticises the industry that, in order to sell some outlandish safety devices, preys on one of parents’ biggest fears: a preventable accident hurting their baby. Summers does not ridicule their fear, but urges parents not to get terrorised by these messages, and instead to set out some practical ground rules to protect infants. Although this article is not focused on ‘baby safety’, I will show that people use the same slogan in dealing with crime. While acknowledging that people are (more) aware of crime, and take precautions, I will note that this awareness and this behaviour does not necessarily have a dramatic impact on people’s daily lives, nor are they to be interpreted as signals for a problematic perception of safety. Parallel to the conclusions of an Australian study by Deborah Lupton (2000), my own research findings in a Flemish neighbourhood raise some strong reservations to the current theoretical assumption that people nowadays are caught up in a ‘Culture of Fear’ (Furedi, 2006) or victims of a ‘Culture of Control’ (Garland, 2001), and that ‘fear of crime’ functions as a way to project (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997) or to express (Jackson, 2004) late modern ambiguous anxieties. In the conclusion I will discuss the relevance of this interpretative research for surveillance studies