 Feeling safe is one of the key themes of the Broadland Community Partnership’s Ten-year vision for Broadland 2004/14 . While the Community Partnership’s priorities centre on reducing actual crime, research suggests that tackling mistrust between the generations might be equally effective at reducing the fear of crime.
In 2002, Age Concern carried out a national survey into older people’s fear of street crime and the impact of this fear on their quality of life. Almost one in five of the older people surveyed had felt intimidated by groups of young people, even though no actual harassment occurred.
Home Office advice on strategies to reduce the fear of crime amongst older people includes the following:
| Encourage more communication and contact between older people and young people, for example by developing an inter-generation programme. Bringing older and younger people together can help both groups to see things from a different perspective and replace mutual mistrust and antipathy with trust and understanding. |
The focus of the Broadland Creative Change project is therefore on building understanding and empathy between young people and older people, seeking common ground, and not overtly dealing with crime or anti-social behaviour.
Thanks to generous funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund's Young Roots scheme, the following Creative Change project will be delivered in Broadland during autumn 2006 and spring 2007.
| Theme | Reducing the fear of crime | | Aims | To build greater empathy between older people and young people, so that the old do not see the young as so intimidating out on the street, and the young are more aware that they can seem threatening without meaning to. | | To show how inter-generational projects could help reduce the fear of crime amongst older people elsewhere in Norfolk. | | Target audience | Older people from the urban fringe area, where perceived fear of crime is highest. Young people aged 11 – 14 from the same area. | | Summary | An intergenerational project to create an exhibition about teenagers past and present, and to tour it to community venues within Broadland: | | When and where | Exhibition created during autumn 2006. Exhibition tours community venues across Broadland during spring 2007. |
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