Many crimes have emotional effects, such as fear and anger, which can also result in psychological problems. This paper attempts to understand the emotional and psychological effect of street robbery on victims, focusing on fear, anger, and mental health, including post-traumatic stress disorder. It also attempts to assess the way robbery circumstances, as well as victims’ characteristics influence their immediate and longer term impact. Findings are presented from two sets of interviews with robbery victims sampled from the United Kingdom police incident records, and conducted within 3 weeks and again 9 months after victimization. Two standardized psychological scales, the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and the Impact Event Scale (IES) were used to measure the victim's psychological health and post-traumatic stress disorder. The study sample consisted of 330 incidents with 149 victims in the first interview and 106 in the second interview 9 months later. Street robbery was found to have a serious and often prolonged psychological effect on many victims. Most victims found it to be a traumatic and terrifying event, and subsequently suffered substantial distress with half the victims classifiable as psychiatric GHQ cases in weeks following the incident and almost a third of the victims still rated as psychiatric cases 9 months after the robbery. Tables and references