Abstract

FERNANDES, Luís  and  REGO, Ximene. Where is the feeling of insecurity? Social and scientific questions concerning the fear of the city. Etnográfica [online]. 2011, vol.15, n.1, pp.167-181. ISSN 0873-6561.

The public debate has taken the issues of (in)security, creating fixed images of what is crime and violence in Portugal. Images full of ambiguity, not only for their paradoxes that the scientific community has shown to be constitutive of the feeling of insecurity, but also by the profusion of utterances of the various social actors on the scene - from the media to the instances of formal control. Here, we follow the shift from the fear of city, with the advent of modern dangers, to the feeling of insecurity, which is the subject of social sciences. We analyse thereafter two determinants of its construction: its eco-social elements - from an ongoing study at the Centre of Porto, and its public dimension - from recent cases with a high media exposure. We expect thus to contribute to a reduction of the degree of ambiguity that has marked the public expression of this subject.

Keywords : feeling of insecurity; crime; mass media; ethnography.

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