The focus is on how people interpret their risk of criminal victimization. Although many previous studies of fear of crime do not explicitly consider the concept of risk or perceived risk in estimating the prevalence of fear, the approach taken by the authors views perceived risk as central to the entire interpretive process. The approach links national survey data on how people think about crime to official crime rates and uses a comprehensive set of environmental and personal variables from a nationally representative sample to examine how fear develops for different crime types. The risk interpretation process is shown to be affected by macro-level ecological, neighborhood, and personal characteristics. Sex is a far more substantial predictor of fear of crime than age. Women, especially younger women who are most often targets of rape, are more afraid of nonsexual crime than men, but this fear is largely due to their fear of sexual crime. Personal and family safety is key in explaining what respondents do to avoid or defend themselves against criminal victimization. Additional information on methods used to assess fear of crime, descriptive statistics on fear of crime, the interview schedule, and supplementary tables are appended. References, notes, tables, and figures