Ėtica e Criminologia. O caso ‘Medo da Criminalidade

The present article approaches the many ways of understanding ethics in criminology, focusing on the statistics on the “fear of criminality”. When approaching ethics and criminology, frequently related dimensions are: serving the person’s rights, the restriction of techniques for gathering information, the methods of investigation or the definition of the research object. Nevertheless, this text focuses on two aspects: 1. the ethical view applied to collecting and using the results of an empirical research, and the paradoxical relation between fear and criminality that such data generate; 2. ethics as a research object, especially when analyzing the elaboration of discourses that approach the issue of fear and that devise a certain model of society. The distinction between these two plans makes it possible to better understand the role of the discourses on criminality and define the criteria for its elaboration. Keyw ords