This chapter describes the role of fear in matters of terrorism and security, starting with the truism that acts of terrorism serve the purposes of terrorists by exploiting the public's fear. It presents an anatomy of fear – its relationship to actual risks, perceived risks, and internal and external stimuli that contribute to perceived risk and fear – and a model of fear management. It considers the roles of the media and politics as both stimuli of fear and tools for managing it.

Fear of Terrorism: Basics

Until 2001, people in the United States had relatively little fear of terrorism. Two vast oceans had insulated the United States from serious acts of violence from foreign sources, and its citizens were further protected against hostile alien forces by the strongest military on earth. Fear was reserved largely for street crime and cancer, airplane crashes and shark attacks, judging from the attention paid to stories on these subjects in media news programming. The suicide attacks on New York and Washington marked the opening of a new chapter in the history of fear in the United States. In the days that followed September 11, people throughout the United States bought many millions of dollars worth of duct tape and gas masks, puzzled over how to act when the terror alert color code was orange, and became extremely suspicious of men in turbans and women in head scarves.