WOMEN'S AND MEN'S FEAR OF GANG CRIMES: SEXU I, AND NONSEXUAL ASSAULT AS PERCEPTU / IJLY CONTEMPORANEOUS OFFENSES*

Perceptually contemporaneous offenses are crimes that are coupled in peo-ple's minds when they express fear. Previous tudies have shown that fear of rape predicts women's fears of other crimes. This study examined the differential effects of sexual and nonsexual assault as offenses that may be coupled with specific gang crimes. For both women and men, once physical harm is accounted for by controlling for fear of nonsexual assault, fear of rape explains much less variance than it does when it was included alone. We argue that fear of physical harm, not the sexual intrusion in rape, has the strongest effect on fear for both women and men. As violent crime rates rose and then fell during the 1990s, fear of crime, especially gang crime, remained a real issue for the public * The National Institute of Justice (Grant 96-IJ-CX-0030) and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (Grant 96-CN-WX-0019) supported this re-search. This article was presented at the 2001 meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Atlanta. We thank the Orange County Chiefs ' and Sheriffs Associa