Fear of Being Robbed

Why fear is part of the definition of robbery

At common law, robbery is taking the property of another with intent to deprive them of it permanently, by means of force or fear. Threatening is sufficient; nothing has to be done to anybody. That element is what separates robbery from the quieter thefts, and it is why the offence is a felony in jurisdictions that keep the distinction, while shoplifting or pickpocketing is not.

The consequence for this entry is a definitional oddity. A person who fears robbery fears an event whose defining feature is that it puts them in fear. Most of the catalogue describes a fear that is disproportionate to its object; here the object is partly made of the reaction to it.

The offence divides into named kinds, and the names are about how the fear is delivered:

• armed robbery, involving a weapon
• aggravated robbery, where the weapon is deadly or appears to be
• highway robbery or mugging, in a street, a car park or any public place
• carjacking, taking a vehicle from its driver by force

The criminal slang runs alongside: blagging for an armed robbery, usually of a bank, stickup from the command to raise hands, and steaming for organised robbery, which originally meant robbing trains.

What the printed encyclopedia gives the word

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias handles harpaxophobia in seven words. A fear of becoming a victim of robbers, followed by a cross-reference to its general entry on robbers, and nothing else: no derivation, no case, no figure, no history of the term.

Wiktionary has no entry for the word at all. Wikipedia has no article either, and what it does with the term is worth recording: searching harpaxophobia produces a redirect to the List of phobias, and the list it redirects to does not contain the word. A reader following the trail ends up on a page that has never heard of the term that sent them there.

Where the robbery figures fail

The fear could in principle be checked against the risk, and this is one of the places where the risk itself is badly measured. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warns that cross-national comparisons should be made with caution, because legal definitions of the offence differ between countries and so do the methods of counting and recording it.

Under-reporting does the rest of the damage, and it does it unevenly. In one country 86 per cent of robberies were reported and in another only 67 per cent, so the published rates are not merely low but differently low. National rates also say nothing about a particular street, since crime concentrates in neighbourhoods rather than distributing itself across a country.

The gap can be very large. A Department of Justice study in 1983 estimated that robberies in schools alone might reach a million a year in the United States, which exceeded the figure the National Crime Survey reported for the whole category. A fear can only be called disproportionate against a number, and the number is contested.

How the fear behaves as a component

The broader subject is fear of crime, which is studied hard and holds the finding this entry sits inside: sensitivity to risk varies dramatically from offence to offence, depending on how serious the offence is perceived to be. Robbery is at the serious end, involving force and a stranger, which is exactly the profile that produces disproportionate worry.

Two neighbours divide the rest of the ground. Scelerophobia fears the intruder who has come inside, and its Latin root names wickedness rather than theft. Stranger fear takes the unfamiliar person anywhere, without the crime.

Harpaxophobia takes the event: being stopped, threatened and relieved of something. The word for it has been in the reference books long enough to acquire three separate index entries in one of them, and in all that time nobody has published a case, measured a prevalence, or written it into a manual.