hearing of friends' or neighbours' victimisation increases anxiety that indirect experiences of crime may play a stronger role in anxieties about victimisation than direct experience. However, there is a cautionary note: '… many residents of a neighbourhood only know of [crime] indirectly via channels that may inflate, deflate, or garble the picture.' A subject's criminal risk perception is exaggerated by peer-communication on crime and only moderated by the own experience. In other words a person may have never witnessed any crime in a one frequented area, and yet perceive the place as high risk. Public perceptions of the risk of crime are no doubt also strongly shaped by mass media coverage. Individuals pick up from media and interpersonal communication circulating images of the criminal event - the perpetrators, victims, motive, and representations of consequential, uncontrollable, and sensational crimes. The notion of 'stimulus similarity' may be key: if the reader of a newspaper identifies with the described victim, or feels that their own neighbourhood bears resemblance to the one described, then the image of risk may be taken up, personalised and translated into personal safety concerns. Yet the relationship between fear of crime and mass media is unclear, at least in its causal ordering. To put the dilemma in simple terms: do people fear crime because a lot of crime is being shown on television, or does television just provide footage about crimes because people fear crime and want to see what's going on? The complex nature of crime could allow the media to exploit social naivety, covering crime not only selective, but also distorting the everyday world of crime. Some say the media contribute to the climate of fear that is created, because the actual frequency of victimisation is a tiny fraction of potential crime. Crime is estimated to be accounting for up to 25 % of news coverage, the quality and angle of the coverage becomes an issue, on the other hand the victimisation rate is 10 or 20 fold less than 25 % in the M The media displays violent crime disproportionately, whilst neglecting minor crimes. The reality is violent crime has been declining in the past 10 years The profile of offenders in the media is distorted, causing misunderstanding of criminal offending. Unfortunately, despite an abundant literature on media effects – particularly the 'mean world' hypothesis – little work has been done into how representations, imagery and