FEAR OF VICTIMIZATION AND THE INTERACTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF HARASSMENT IN A LATINO NEIGHBORHOOD

The study of fear of crime has been dominated by survey researchers an d quantitative analysis. However, very little is known about the kinds of social situations that generate fear, the ways in which people man age fear during social interaction, and the manner in which feared ind ividuals respond to another's show of vulnerability. The author attend s to these issues with data collected during observational research in an urban Latino community. Based on one particular setting, he discov ered that the fearful and the feared often worked together to produce confrontational episodes. Driven by past harassment and ethnic prejudi ce, and influenced by media accounts of local violence, many pedestria ns displayed obvious fear to the men who congregated in a commercial d istrict. The author found that fearful behavior often resulted in hara ssment because it implicitly labeled men as dangerous. Men who sensed another's fear often reacted by behaving in a threatening manner.