In places such as Columbia, people never expect bad things to happen. But as more suburban crimes get news coverage, more residents realize they are no longer 100 percent safe.
“Many residents of middle-income suburban communities feel immune from what they see as big-city crime,” said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. “When a hideous murder occurs in their town, they are shocked. They remain in a state of disbelief.”
People who experience a crime no longer feel safe, and most go through anxiety and depression, said Neil Kaye, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
Suburban misconceptions can lead to vulnerability and lack of preparation in a community, Levin said.
However, people need some assumptions to keep from getting paranoid and to maintain a certain sense of security, said John Nicoletti, a Colorado police psychologist who worked with many victims of the Columbine shootings in the 1990s.
“We all operate on a series of assumptions,” Nicoletti said. “These assumptions keep us from going crazy.”
However, Kelly McGonigal, a research psychologist at Stanford University in California, said people who live in the suburbs feel mostthreatened after they hear about violent crimes.
“The people who experience the greatest stress and fear from reports of crime actually have the lowest risk for it,” McGonigal said.
Polly Franks, executive director of the Virginia-based Franks Foundation, which works on preventive measures and helps victims of sexual abuse, was unaware of the risks in her Virginia neighborhood when a neighbor raped two of her daughters.
“Denial is such a detriment,” Franks said. “Denial can actually be deadly.”
