Enter Gavin de Becker, security consultant to the stars. De Becker has a lot to say about crime and the fear of crime, and he says it persuasively in a just-published book, ““The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence’’ (Little, Brown. $22.95). His message is that a mixture of common sense and intuition - the subliminal sense that danger may be lurking nearby - is the best defense you’ve got. Find yourself in a lonely parking lot late at night, wondering whether someone is waiting to grab you from behind? Find an escort. Don’t like the looks of that seedy-looking guy in the elevator? Wait for another car. Pay attention to your gut sense that something’s not quite right, de Becker says, and take prudent, reasonable steps to control the situation. ““The key question is the difference between true fear and unwarranted fear,’’ he told NEWSWEEK. ““True fear is a signal in the presence of danger, and it is based on your perception, your environment or your circumstances. Unwarranted fear is your imagination or your memory. If it’s not something you can smell, see, taste, hear, et cetera, it’s likely to be unwarranted.''
““Gift of Fear’’ is a self-help book for the nation’s No. 1 phobia - a sure-fire recipe for publishing success and a self-promotional gambit that probably leaves de Becker’s competitors wondering why they didn’t think of it first. The book already tops the best-seller lists. Oprah Winfrey endorsed it on television, a publicity bonanza that led Little, Brown to print an additional 250,000 copies. Libraries from Arlington, Texas, to Olympia, Wash., report waiting lists of readers. ““What I have learned… is the unbelievable extent to which people are experiencing interpersonal victimization - stalking, date stalking and so on,’’ de Becker says.
Many of these everybodies are women, whose fear of crime is rightly larger than men’s. (According to government estimates, one woman in 20 will be stalked at some point in her life.) De Becker’s blend of empathy, reassurance and common sense wows women readers just as it wowed the audience on ““Oprah’’ - and he is clearly aware of that. Still, he is a respected expert whose Los Angeles company, Gavin de Becker Inc., provides security services to Hollywood stars, Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies. ““Gift of Fear’’ takes direct aim at the contradiction between the official statistics showing crime is down and our gut sense that we are still vulnerable to attack. As de Becker rightly emphasizes, most Americans exaggerate the risk of random crime. Like other experts, he blames local news media, which frequently overplay crime stories in a desperate search for audience. ““The local news has a financial investment in making us believe in the randomness of violence,’’ he says. ““We live in a country in which only 20 percent of the homicides are committed by strangers, and yet look at the news-media coverage. The phrase “random and senseless’ is bulls–t… we are focused on unusual fears [because] we aren’t interested in hearing about the risks posed by the people in our lives.''
““There is more fear in the United States than there is risk,’’ de Becker says. But, he adds, ““one of the things I want a reader to come away with is being less afraid. There is nothing to fear - unless and until you feel fear.’’ There’s a ton of significance in that intentional paradox - a crucial distinction between anxiety (the generalized feeling that something bad could happen sometime) and fear itself, which de Beck- er says is a valid, commonsensical response to a specific situation containing risk. Fear is good, he argues, while anxiety is just anxiety - an emotion that we all have sometimes but shouldn’t overreact to. The trick, for millions of crime-obsessed Americans, is knowing the difference - and learning to switch off the bloody news that makes cowards of us all.
