The Social Construction of Crime

Last Updated on September 16, 2026 by Karl Thompson

The idea that crime is socially constructed is a key idea within the sociology of crime and deviance. This means that social processes determine whether an act is legal or not. The introduction of new Acts of Parliament continually change the laws which change the nature of crime.

There are many things which were not illegal in the past which are criminal and thus illegal now.

A brief timeline of some recent changes to the law illustrate this…

This is examined on AQA Paper 3 (7192/3), and it is usually the first idea taught in the crime and deviance module, because everything that follows depends on it. The examples below are all UK, all within living memory, and all usable as evidence in an essay.

1973 – Motorcycle helmets made compulsory

Before 1973 it was perfectly legal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, not so from 1973.

The requirement came in under the Motor Cycles (Wearing of Helmets) Regulations 1973, made under the Road Traffic Act. It was opposed at the time by riders who argued it was an intrusion on personal freedom — an argument which, notably, nobody makes now. The label stuck, and the behaviour normalised behind it.

1991 – rape within marriage made illegal

Previous to this it was held that men could not rape women within marriage, because the marriage union was equivalent to consensual sex at any time.

The exemption was abolished by the House of Lords in R v R on 23 October 1991. The Lords held that the idea of irrevocable consent through marriage no longer reflected what marriage was, and that it formed no part of the law of England. Parliament then put the position into statute in section 142 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and the law is now found in section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

This is worth getting right, because the three dates get confused constantly. 1991 is when the law changed — a court decision. 1994 is when Parliament wrote it down. 2003 is the Act that governs it today. Scotland had reached the same conclusion separately, two years earlier, in 1989.

1994 – informally organised Raves made illegal (sort of)

In 1994 The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 clamped down on anti-social behaviour. It effectively gave the police new powers to break up raves, or any informally arranged gathering of 100 or more people listening to music involving a series of repetitive beats.

The 1992 Castlemorton rave, the biggest ever informally organised rave in British history, is one of the events that led to the establishment of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act…

NB the act didn’t technically make it illegal for you and your mates to organise a rave, it just makes it easier for the police to break them up, slap an injunction order on you, and then arrest you the next time for breaking the injunction order.

This notorious act also made it easier for the police to break up road protests, move on travellers and arrest hunt saboteurs.

The “repetitive beats” definition in section 63 is worth quoting in an essay, because it is one of the few places where Parliament has tried to define a musical genre in law. It is also a good example of a law aimed at a subculture rather than at an act — which is Becker’s point about moral entrepreneurs almost exactly.

2007 – the smoking ban

The 2007 ban made it illegal to smoke indoors in public places such as public transport and bars. In England it came into force on 1 July 2007 under the Health Act 2006. Scotland went first in March 2006, followed by Wales and Northern Ireland in April 2007.

You used to be able to smoke in pubs, as the video below illustrates…

Besides being some seriously excellent music, there’s plenty of people smoking away in the background! Keep in mind that this was on mainstream TV in 1982 at Christmas, when smoking in public was perfectly usual!

I’d thoroughly recommend taking a study break for 40 minutes and watching the whole thing, but if you’re ‘on a study vibe’ fast forward to around 4 minutes and the second song ‘London Girls’ – you can clearly see the cigarette smoke wafting behind Chas, or it might be Dave. (I love them, but I’m not sure which is which!)

NB ‘London Girls’ is also a lesson in gender norms at the time. Things have ‘progressed’ there a bit too you might say!

2016 – The Psychoactive Substances Act

In 2016 the Psychoactive Substances Act made the selling of ‘Spice’ and other previously ‘legal highs’ illegal.

Acts restricting (or allowing) the use of psychoactive substances are useful examples in themselves to illustrate how ‘crime’ is socially constructed. The Act took a completely different approach from the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971: instead of listing banned substances one by one, it banned anything capable of producing a psychoactive effect and then listed the exceptions — alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and medicines among them.

That exception list is the interesting part. Three of the most widely used psychoactive drugs in Britain were written out of the definition of the problem at the moment the problem was being defined. Whether a drug is a crime turns out to depend a good deal on how long people have been using it.

2023 – Nitrous oxide made a Class C drug

The most recent example, and the clearest.

Before November 2023 it was legal to possess nitrous oxide. It sat under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which made supplying the gas for its psychoactive effects an offence but not possessing it. From 8 November 2023 it became a Class C drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The chemical didn’t change and the users didn’t change — overnight, a lot of people became criminals.

What makes this a textbook case rather than just a change in the law is what happened to the evidence. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is the government’s own statutory expert body, and ministers are legally required to consult it. It reviewed the harms in March 2023 and recommended against control, finding that the harms didn’t justify it and that criminalising possession would be disproportionate. The government rejected that recommendation and went ahead anyway, stating in its own guidance that it had gone further than the ACMD’s advice, because visible drug use is one of the antisocial behaviours the public most complains about.

The law moved for reasons that had very little to do with the pharmacology and a lot to do with public order politics. If you want a single example to use in an essay about who defines crime and why, this is the one.

Reported use did fall afterwards. According to the ONS, nitrous oxide use among 16–24 year olds dropped from 3.3% in the year to March 2024 to 1.3% in the year to March 2025. HOWEVER, the survey asks people to admit to something that has just been criminalised, so some of that fall may be people declining to report rather than people stopping.

2020–2022 – physical punishment of children banned in Scotland and Wales

Scotland abolished the defence of “reasonable punishment” first, under the Children (Equal Protection from Assault) (Scotland) Act 2019, which came into force on 7 November 2020. Wales followed with the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Act 2020, in force from 21 March 2022.

In England and Northern Ireland the defence still stands, under section 58 of the Children Act 2004. A parent charged with common assault on their own child can still argue the punishment was reasonable, provided it left no mark and caused no actual bodily harm.

So the same act — a parent smacking a child — is a criminal offence in Cardiff and a defensible one in Bristol, twenty-five miles apart, in the same country, today. Nothing about the act has changed. Only the jurisdiction has.

This is the strongest example on this page for exam purposes, because it removes the time variable altogether. Most examples of the social construction of crime rely on comparing now with the past, and a student can always argue that society simply learned something in between. Here there is nothing to learn — the difference is purely a matter of where the line was drawn, and by whom.

2020–2022 – Coronavirus: the lockdown laws

Between March 2020 and early 2022, behaviour that had never been regulated in peacetime became criminal, changed repeatedly, and then stopped being criminal again.

At various points it was an offence to leave home without a reasonable excuse, to gather in a group of more than six, to enter a shop without a face covering, or to travel between areas placed in different tiers. The rules were made under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, often came into force within hours of being announced, and differed between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — and between regions within them.

The lockdown laws remain one of the best illustrations of the social construction of crime available, for three reasons. They were created and removed within a single two-year period, so the whole life cycle is visible. They varied by region, so identical behaviour was criminal in one town and lawful in the next. And enforcement was contested throughout — thousands of fixed penalty notices issued under the regulations were later found to have been wrongly issued, which raises the labelling question of who actually ends up being punished.

What this argument does and does not show

Examiners reward students who can push an argument and then find its limits. This one has clear limits.

The examples above establish that a great deal of what counts as crime is a product of decisions — by Parliament, by courts, by police forces — rather than a property of the acts themselves. That is the sociological point and it is well supported.

HOWEVER, the argument works better at the margins than at the core. Homicide, rape and serious assault are criminalised in effectively every society, which suggests that not everything is equally constructed. A student who claims that “all crime is socially constructed” will usually get less credit than one who distinguishes between offences whose status shifts with the politics of the day and offences that do not.

The marital rape example is the sharpest test of this, and it cuts the other way from the rest of the timeline. The act was always harmful. What changed in 1991 was not the act or its consequences but the willingness of the law to recognise them — and that recognition was driven by a change in the social status of women, which is itself a sociological explanation. Social construction here doesn’t mean the harm was invented. It means the law took until 1991 to catch up with it.

The useful essay line is that the social construction of crime explains the boundaries of the criminal law rather than its centre — and that where the boundary sits tells you a good deal about who holds power.

Putting it all together…

So in 1972 you could have drunk a couple of pints in the pub while smoking (in the pub), organised and attended a quick rave with your mates with all of you high on whatever so-called ‘legal highs’ existed in 1972, and ridden home on your bike without your helmet on (assuming you were within the drink driving limits) — and none of that would have been illegal, so you would have committed no crime.

Act out the same scenario today and you’d be breaking multiple laws.

Run it forwards instead and the point holds just as well: a 1972 rider would be baffled by the idea that not wearing a helmet is an offence, and a 2026 student is probably baffled by the idea that you could smoke in a hospital waiting room. Neither generation is right. They are living under different constructions.

NB this post makes no judgement about the morality of any of the above acts or laws, it’s merely to highlight the extent to which crime is socially constructed.

Signposting

This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA A-level sociology course (7192/3).

The idea that crime is socially constructed comes from interactionism, and is developed in full in my post on the labelling theory of crime and deviance — including Becker’s concept of the moral entrepreneur, which most of the examples above illustrate.

For the broader question of how crime is defined and how many acts of Parliament create it, see What is Crime?

My main page of crime and deviance posts covers the rest of the module.

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