Onveiligheidsgevoelens

The prevention of (unnecessary) feelings of insecurity has become an almost as important goal of governments in recent years as the fight against crime and insecurity itself. There is a growing awareness that safety perception has its own dynamic and that the connection with 'objective' safety (crime figures, chance of victimization) is not clear. Although the Safety Monitor 2017 (2018) shows that Dutch people have less often felt unsafe since 2012, this decline does not keep pace with the simultaneous fall in crime on almost all fronts. Despite a mountain of (international) studies in the field of fear of crime, as this area of __research within criminology is called, it is still not really clear what can be done to positively influence the safety experience of citizens. Feelings of insecurity seem like a many-headed monster. It is difficult to get a grip on this container concept. In this special issue it becomes clear that ons-size-fits-all solutions do not exist and that governments do well to engage with citizens before designing and implementing a policy against feelings of insecurity