ANDROMACHI TSELONI and KEN PEASE ‘NUISANCE’ PHONE CALLS TO WOMEN IN ENGLAND AND WALES ABSTRACT. Obscene or nuisance phone calls are particularly targeted towards women. Employing data from two sweeps of the British Crime Survey a decade apart (BCS 1982 and BCS 1992), this work attempts to measure the effects of individual socio-economic characteristics and victimization history of women in England and Wales on their like- lihood of receiving at least one nuisance call. To make the logit modelling analysis more tangible, risks of nuisance calls are calculated from our models of five hypothetical women, single mother, professional, student, housewife and pensioner, with specific attributes taken from the set of explanatory variables. KEY WORDS: female victims, obscene phone calls, statistical analysis, threats, victim survey Obscene, threatening and other troubling telephone calls have been ne- glected by criminologists. Like threats, they are in many ways judged to fall between fear of crime and direct crime victimization. Indeed, they tend to be referred to by telecommunications companies as nuisance calls, implying their triviality. Yet Pease (1985) pointed out that nuisance calls induce fear of crime in recipients, in particular fear of burglary and sexual assault. Obscene phone calls can be seriously distressing (Buck et al. 1995). One reason for this may be the often chronic nature of this victimization, as will be discussed later. The rated seriousness of such offences is also surprisingly high: “Threatening phone calls are rated on a par with do- mestic burglary and obscene calls with bag snatching, both being rated as much more serious than car theft, fiddling social security or tax, soliciting for prostitution or minor shop theft.” (Buck et al. 1995, p. 14) Buck et al. (1995) provide an extensive report of obscene phone calls based on four available data sets for England and Wales during the 1982– 1992 period. However, their statistical analysis is very limited. Statistical inference results as two way contingency tables are only presented for one data set (1992 British Crime Survey). Therefore, the majority of the analysis cannot be presumed to be for the adult female population in Eng- land and Wales. In addition, contingency table analysis has considerable limitations. Particular comparisons, where possible, between the results of Buck et al. (1995) and of this study are given in section three. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 6: 91–111, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.