Living in poorer areas can worsen anxiety and paranoia or set it off in vulnerable individuals.

In poorer areas people have a “survival mode” mentality, you can’t just walk down your road without looking back at least once. You are lucky if you don’t know anyone in your area who wants to harm or say bad things about you. But for many kids and young adults in my street this is a constant reality for them. 

Now the media only makes things worse much worse than it should be. Hoodies and tracksuits are a fashion in my area. Its common to see young adult males walking around in hoodies at night, they do this maybe for their own protection not to hurt anyone else. I guess you would call these sort of people “chavs.” Even if most of them are not as dangerous as the media loves to make them out to be they can still set fear in people hearts. Now that hoodies symbolise crime.



In UK, hoodies have been regarded in negative ways. For example, people dressed in hooded sweatshirts were banned from public arena, such as shopping centers, in 2005. The move was welcomed by many, including then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair saw such particular action as an endeavor to minimize anti-social and threatening behavior.

I don’t see why its ok to promote fear in the media about certain groups of people when the target audience don’t even live in the areas of SAID “dangerous” groups. However what about about those that do yet have not encountered any trouble or crime of any sort? It will only make everyone more paranoid about a danger that simply isn’t there or is minimal at best and will cause more animosity thus leading to passive aggressive behaviours and irrational violence.

Maybe its the media’s job to keep setting the poor against each other, “light the fire and watch them burn.”

Well its working.

An example, I cannot walk in my area anymore especially at night without fear of being mugged, raped, or worst. My parents have constantly told me to stop walking around at night because “its dangerous.” My anxiety has tripled recently because of this and now my body responds irrationally to every little sound I hear and even to people who are no danger. Even in my own house.

My first reaction is to look upon people with suspicion.

Our body goes into defence mode as soon as danger is presented to it, it should not be on defence mode constantly. This only started recently I was not like this before. This is concerning as I know other people’s words influence my beliefs and psyche about certain things. I’ve also noticed that when I walk past some people in the street in my hoodie at night I see the same fear in them. To them I could be a potential killer, thug or mugger. Is it irrational to be fearful of said dangers? No

Is it irrational to be fearful all the time? Yes.

Now for a fact about living in poorer areas. Poor areas do not equate to crime. There have been many poor communities appearing about in Britain over the past 80 odd years or so not all of them were “crime ridden.” In today’s society’s poor = criminal. How did this happen? Why did this happen?

Why are we now promoting terrible self image of the poor? That’s social conditioning at its best. It must come to a stop.