A couple of not very pleasant news-items which relate to the problems of the ‘ageing population’:
The U.K. is on the brink of a social care crisis according to The Independent (November 2016) – with local authorities saying they could face a £2.6 billion funding gap by 2020.
According to The Guardian (December 2016), this is because funding has been slashed by 10%; there has been a 25% reduction in the number of people receiving help, and a third of all care homes face bankruptcy after cuts in the fees paid by local authorities.
All of this of course means that elderly people receive a lower quality of care, either in care-homes, or through reduced numbers of home-visits, but Age UK (Sept 2015) further calculates that up to a million people who have difficulties with basic activities such as getting dressed get no help at all.
All of this suggests that the problems of the ageing population are very much real, and given the present government’s neoliberal ideology, seem likely to get worse.
The link between Poverty, Ethnic Conflict, Failed States and Crimes against Humanity
Take another look at Transparency Internationals Corruption Index and you’ll see there is clear link between poverty and corruption, and war and conflict. Many of these countries are caught in a vicious cycle of poverty, ethnic conflict, corruption and war which reinforce each other, and many of the worst state-crimes are done by nation states in times of civil-war.
According to Paul Collier, the problem starts with the fact that political leaders in developing countries don’t see politics in the same way that politicians in developed countries see politics – political office isn’t about public service – it is about getting as much money for yourself and the people that got you elected as possible. NB this is a rational response to gaining political power when the country is unstable and you don’t know how long you’re going to be in office for (because there are several other competitors who could potentially revolt against you).
In many cases, corruption will simply mean siphoning off public funds into private bank accounts, but the pursuit of profit by unethical governments can also mean harming citizens of countries – as with the Nigerian government allowing Shell to get away with polluting the Ogoni people’s lands in the Niger Delta, or the Ethiopian government displacing people when it leased an area the size of Wales to India.
In some other developing countries, political incumbents maintain power by the rule of terror – as is the case in many countries in Africa, most notably Zimbabwe and Sudan.
Such poor treatment of populations breeds the conditions for civil war and all of the various attendant war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as the recruitment of child soldiers and rape as a weapon of war, which go along with this. In extreme cases may result in terrorist organisations taking control – as in Afghanistan, Somalia and currently ISIS in Syria/ Iraq.
Evaluation
The problem with this view is that although there is a link between underdevelopment and state crime, some developed, or rapidly development nation states do appear very low down the corruption index – most notably Russia and China, two of the BRIC nations.
A Dependency Theorist (Marxist) Perspective on State Crime
From a Dependency point of view state crimes are not limited to developing countries. For a start, two of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity – Colonialism, which was basically the organised theft of resources through violence conquest, and slavery, were both a key part of the development of Capitalism in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
The sheer brutality and death toll inflicted on the peoples of North and South America, Asia and Africa by the European colonisers was far worse than the suffering in the two World Wars or any war since.
Today, it is also clear that it isn’t just poor states which engage in state-crime. Take the USA for example – In 2003 it went to war in Iraq against UN conventions, and today it maintains Guantanamo Bay where it holds prisoners without trial. This view is explored in John Pilger’s excellent film ‘War on Democracy’ in which he points out that the USA, since the end of WW2 has been involved militarily in more than 50 countries, all of these illegal interventions. By international standards, the USA is one of the worst abusers of human rights in world history.
A further point here is that Western countries are happy to accept other states abusing human rights if they are either powerful or support Western interests (or both) – so we say nothing about the Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women or its public flogging of criminals, and nothing of China preventing freedom of speech.
In short, from a Dependency Perspective, state-crime against the powerless is a systematic part of development. It is a means whereby rich countries make themselves rich at the expense of poor ones, and rich people in both rich and poor countries, make themselves rich at the expense of the powerless.
Evaluation of the Dependency View
Functionalists argue that the laws put in place by Nation States represent the collective morality of the people, and that when the agents of the state (the police and the courts) police and punish criminal behaviour, this reinforces the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Thus Nation States and their agents of social control are the ‘good guys’, working to maintain law and order and punish those criminals who would disrupt this.
Moreover, Nation States with functioning governments are a crucial part of modern societies. In the SCLY3 Global Development Module we found that nearly all wealthy nations have massive public sectors where governments provides universal goods such as health care and education and to provide the infrastructure required for economic growth.
In short, Functionalism stresses that despite the history of Colonialism, the role of America in war crimes today, and the existence of some state crime in developed countries (the expenses scandal and institutionalised police racism in the UK for example) the average citizen comes to less harm with a stable state rather than without it and state crime isn’t really a significant problem in developed countries.
Anthony Giddens (1990) defines globalisation as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped be events occurring many miles away and vice versa.
David Held (1992) sees globalisation in terms of the greater interconnectedness of social life and social relationships throughout the world.
As a result of globalisation, what happens in one part of the world can quickly affect other parts of the world.
The globalisation of crime
One of the downsides of the increasing interconnectedness between societies is the increase in global crime – Manuel Castells (1998) argues that there is now a global criminal economy worth over one trillion per annum. Four of the major forms of global crime which he recognises include:
1. The drugs trade
2. People Trafficking
3. Cyber crimes
4. International Terrorism
Global Criminal Networks and The Global Criminal Economy
Global Criminal networks involve complex interconnections between a range of criminal networks which transcend national boundaries including the American Mafia, Columbian drug cartels, the Russian Mafia, Chinese Triads and the Sicilian Costa Nostra.
Global criminal networks have developed because of the growth of an information age in which knowledge as well as goods and people can move quickly and easily across national boundaries.
According to Misha Glenny (see below) these networks form a global criminal economy which accounts for 15% of global trade – (Misha Glenny, (2008) McMafia: Crime without Frontiers). In order of importance (in economic terms) the main crimes organised criminal gangs engage in are:
• Drug trafficking estimated – 8 % of world trade
• Money laundering estimated 2 – 5 % of global GDP.
• 4 – 5 million people trafficked each year = profits of up to US$9.5 billion
In addition these criminal networks also trade in weapons, pharmaceuticals, nuclear materials, body parts, metals, precious stones / natural resources, stolen cars, art, antiques, rare animals and counterfeit goods; they Provide and control illicit services, most notably, gambling and prostitution, they engage in cybercrime, robbery, kidnapping, extortion, corruption,and piracy, and finally there is also terrorism.
Misha Glenny: The role of organised Crime in Ex-Communist Countries
Glenny suggests that organised criminal gangs are especially important in facilitating the trade in illegal goods and service. Organised criminal gangs (basically the Mafia) have become especially influential in those areas of the world where there is weak rule of law (i.e. failed and transitional states), distrust of the state (i.e. Italy, and Mexico), Inaccessible terrain (i.e. Peru and Colombia), high levels of corruption, and easy access to weapons and access to Transnational networks.
One of the most significant criminal networks which impacts Europe operates from Bulgaria – a country which is a ‘Hub’ between the rich and poor parts of the world, and where the Mafia have held considerable power since the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s. Most of the drugs people take in the UK and many of the prostitutes British men sleep with have been shipped by the Bulgarian Mafia. Evaluation of Glenny
Dick Hobbs and Colin Dunningham their 1990s ethnographic study examined how organised crime has expanded on the back of globalisation. They suggest that criminal organisations like the Mafia are not dominant, but most global crime operates through a glocal system – that is, there’s a global distribution network built from local connections. For example local growers of cannabis, deliver their product to a supply-chain feeding a global network of users. For example Columbian drug barons use glocal systems to deliver their product to the world.
Outline and explain two criticisms of the Functionalist view of society (10)
To be on the safe side you want to provide two very different criticisms, develop both of them and briefly evaluate. This is probably overkill to get you the 10 marks.
Conflict theorists (Marxists and Feminists) point out that Functionalists have a rose tinted view of society – they focus too much on the positive functions that institutions perform, ignoring the negative ways in which institutions and socialisation can have on certain people. Feminists for example argue that the traditional nuclear family, which is seen as necessary by Parsons, oppresses women, as they are expected to fulfil the housewife role, which ultimately makes women dependent on men for an income, and ends up benefitting men who benefit from women’s emotional and domestic labour. They also ignore the really ‘dark side of family life’ – domestic violence.
You could take this criticism even further by arguing that Functionalist theory is itself ideological – by arguing that societies need nuclear families to provide effective socialisation, this theory itself reinforces the social order. Radical Feminists would argue against the idea that the nuclear family is necessary, as shown by the fact that most single parent families do just a good job as socialising children as nuclear families.
However, Functionalists would still argue that most people are better off with clear boundaries provided by socialisation through institutions as this prevents anomie, which could still be regarded as a curse of modern societies.
Interactionists criticise Functionalism for being a deterministic theory – human behaviour is portrayed as being shaped by the social system, as if individuals are programmed by social institutions, being the puppets of social forces.
There is a considerable amount of evidence against this view – for example despite most people being socialised into traditional gender norms, many people today develop LGTBIQ identities; despite being socialised to obey the law, self-report studies show high levels of minor criminality. It as if people are just pretending to obey social norms, but when you dig deeper and look at things more qualitatively, behind closed doors, this isn’t necessarily the case, and everyone is ‘doing their own thing’.
Postmodernists would be especially critical of the idea that society shapes the individual a postmodern, consumer age, your background and socialisation matter less – consumer society and globalisation allow much more opportunity for individuals to shape their own identities in an active way.
However, it is easy to overstate how free people are – people may think their free, but human action is still patterned and things like suicide and educational success still seem to be shaped by an individual’s social background…
The Apprentice – The Final Five demonstrates some of the subtle ways in which the class structure disadvantages those from working class backgrounds –
To focus on just one example, Frances was a straight A student who dropped out of the University of Durham because ‘it sounds ridiculous’ but she didn’t feel liked she fitted in.
Frances Bishop – eventually fired after the interview round
Here’s some class-based theorising about why she may’ve dropped out… of course it’s just theory, with any luck she’ll comment and say whether there’s any truth in it or not, can’t beat a bit of qualitative feedback after all…
From a broadly Marxist perspective, the 18 year old Frances’ naive lack of awareness of the class structure may have played a role in her dropping out – had she realised in advance that elite universities are are chock full of hot-housed middle class students then she might have been better prepared to endure three years of alienation and anomie.
Better days?
I imagine her first sense of dislocation came from her material disadvantage – it’s likely that many of her peers would be familiar with going for regular meals-out/ regular wardrobe changes/ maybe even ski-holidays, which someone from a poorer background (her step-dad was a truck driver) wouldn’t be familiar with – I’m sure Francis’ weekly budget was considerably lower than the average, and with no middle-class-daddy safety net to back her up, her days keeping up with the fillees were always going to be numbered.
Then you have to add to this her lack of cultural capital – Frances’ lack of knowledge of middle class values and tastes would further alienate her – I’m sure concepts such as weekend breaks , ponies, and ski holidays would be misnomers, for example, hardly grist for her conversational mill.
(UPDATE 30/12/16 – Frances did comment, and my speculation seems to have been ‘close to the mark’! What can I say – looks like social class barriers are a social fact!)
@realsociology a few comments close to the mark. Many had a sense of entitlement that didn't sit well with me.
If only Frances had read some Bourdieu in advance of going to uni, she might not have expected to fit in at all, and maybe this would’ve helped her to endure and get her degree – then again, maybe that would’ve left her worse off, she seems to have done alright for herself in the end, even if she doesn’t win Sugar’s cash.
Frances isn’t the only media celebrity to fall fowl of the evils of cultural capital – Mary Berry tried doing the same to Gregg Wallace as the Durham fillies did to Frances, but Gregg seemed to be more able to resist the affront.
I feel like I’m gradually collecting celebrity victims of cultural capital, maybe one day we’ll all find each other on the front line of the coming class war… it’d make for a good selfie.
The Myth of Meritocracy and The Structure of Luck – The later half of the post focuses on the role luck played in Alana’s (the eventual winner of The Apprentice 2016) eventual victory – the blonde one to the left in the above picture.
Below are a few resources focusing on the causes and consequences of the ongoing (hopefully soon to be recent) civil war in Syria. (‘War and Conflict’ in relation to development is part of the A Level Sociology Global Development topic).
The causes of the civil war in Syria
This Guardian video does a reasonable job of explaining some of the causes of the Syrian Civil War in five minutes. NB it has its critics – see below!
The trigger event which caused the Civil War in Syria was when 1000s of people took the street in January 2011 to demand political reforms (e.g. elections) inspired by ‘The Arab Spring ‘ – a wave of violent and non-violent protests which had swept across many North African and Middle Eastern Countries in December – January 2012.
The protesters were protesting about the brutal rule of dictator president Assad who had ruled Syria in the interests of a relatively small elite since the year 2000, when he took over from his father, who had ruled the country since the 1970s, having modernised it while brutally repressing any dissent.
Assad’s response to the protests was to violently repress the initially non-violent protests by shooting over a hundred demonstrators. Over the coming months some of these armed themselves and formed small groups of rebels – the ensuing conflict between Assad’s security forces and the rebels resulted in 60 000 deaths in the first 18 months of the conflict.
The root of the conflict can be further traced back to the after math of World War I when France and Britain established the boarders of the Middle Eastern Countries, lumping many different ethnic groups and religions into Syria. The ethnic/ religious breakdown of Syria’s population is approximately 12% Alawites (President Assad’s ethnic group),8% Christians, 3% Shiites, and 74% Sunnis.
NB – The video has an equal amount of likes and dislikes – with many of the commentators pointing to the fact that the video misses out the role of the USA in causing conflict all across the middle east – commentators argue that the US has a long history of arming rebel groups in the Middle East as part of its foreign policy to deliberately destabilise the region.
Who is Fighting Who and Why?
This second video by VOX starts off by pointing out that the war in Syria is a mess, with four main groups involved:
The Assad/ government forces, backed by Russia and Iran,
The Rebels, backed by the Saudis, Turkey and the USA,
The Kurds, also backed by the USA
ISIS, which established a ‘Caliphate’ in an area which spread across the Syria-Iraq border.
This video focuses more on how the conflict has develop and points to the important fact that Syria has now become a ‘Proxy War’ in which other nation states are effectively fighting each other by funding different factions within the conflict, but without being directly involved themselves.
By 2013 money and troops were being funneled to the rebels by Sunni Muslims (e.g. the Saudis) While Iran (Shia Muslims) funneled money and troops to Assad.
In late 2013, the USA stepped into the war when Obama signed a secret deal for the CIA to train and equip the rebels.
In February 2014 ISIS emerges – which focuses on fighting the rebels and the Kurds, not Assad, and the US now has an ongoing dilemma which confuses matters and possibly prevents the US from taking effective action – who is it’s real enemy – ISIS or Assad?
Up until this time, Assad was losing ground to both the rebels and ISIS until September 2015 when Russia stepped in by bombing US backed rebels, and to date (December 2016) it seems like Assad is likely to defeat the rebel forces.
NB – As with the previous video, this also has its critics, so as with all sources, be skeptical of the validity!
Causes of the Civil War in Syria – A Summary
To my mind, for the purposes of A level Sociology you can simplify the causes of this conflict thus:
Nasty bad men (dictators) in the middle east don’t allow people to vote and oppress anyone who opposes them.
People in many middle eastern countries want the right to vote and basically governments who don’t abuse their human rights.
They use social media to organise and publicise protests – which spread all over the middle east and quickly to Syria
The nasty dictator, Assad, wants to cling onto power so he kills hundreds of the protesters
Other nations have a role to play in perpetuating the crisis – Russia and Iran by funding Assad and the USA by funding the rebels.
NB – Don’t fall into the trap of seeing the USA as backing the ‘good guys’ and supporting democracy versus the bad Russians and crazy Muslims who want to keep the evil dictator Assad in place because that’s in their economic/ ideological interests – the USA has a history of backing ‘evil dictators’ itself, when they support US interests at least.
You could further trace all of these problems back to the ethnic and religious divide/ tensions in Syria, which in turn was at least partially created by the French and British when they invented the country by drawing up artificial boarders after World War I.
Social Facts are one of Emile Durkheim’s most significant contributions to sociology. Social facts are things such as institutions, norms and values which exist external to the individual and constrain the individual.
The University of Colorado lists as examples of social facts: institutions, statuses, roles, laws, beliefs, population distribution, urbanization, etc. Social facts include social institutions, social activities and [the strata of society – for example the class structure, subcultures etc.]
The video below provides a useful introduction to the concept of social facts….
The video suggests that the concept ‘social fact’ is a broad term designed to encompass the social environment which constrains individual behaviour.
It uses the analogy of a how the physical structure of a room limits our actions (we can only go in and through the door or windows for example; in the same way the social facts which make up our social environment constrains us – norms, values, beliefs, ideologies and so on effectively limit our choices.
Sociology is about identifying the relationship between the social conditions and people’s behaviour.
This second video is a bit more complex…
According to Durkheim, social facts emerge out of collectives of individuals, they cannot be reduced to the level of individuals – and this social reality is real, and it exists above the level of the individual, sociology is the study of this ‘level above the individual’.
As far as Durkheim was concerned this was no different to the concept that human life is greater than the sum of the individual cells which make it up – society has a reality above that of the individuals who constitute it.
A key idea of Durkheim – that we should never reduce the study of society to the level of the individual, we should remain at the level of social facts and aim to explain social action in relation to social facts.
(Not in the video) – this is precisely what Durkheim did in his study of suicide by trying to explain variations in the suicide rate (which is above the level of the individual) through other social facts, such as the divorce rate, the pace of economic growth, the type of religion (all of which he further reduced to two basic variables – social integration and social regulation.
In this way sociology should aim to be scientific, it should not study individuals, but scientific trends at the level above the individual. This is basically the Positivist approach to studying society, as laid down in Durkhiem’s 1895 work ‘The Rules of Sociological Method’.
NB Durkheim’s study of suicide is just about the best illustration of the application of social facts that there is – In which he researched official statistics on suicide in several European countries and found that the suicide rate was influenced by social facts such as the divorce rate, the religion of a country, and the pace of economic and social changed – Durkheim further theorized that the suicide rate increased when there was either too much or too little integration and regulation in society.
The major criticism of Durkheim’s concept of social facts is that the statistics he claims to be ‘social facts’ aren’t – suicide stats are open to manipulation by the people who record them (coroners) – and there is huge potential for several suicides (intentional deaths) to be mis-recorded as open verdicts or accidental deaths and thus we can never be 100% certain of the validity of this data, thus theorising on the basis of cross national comparisons based on said data is risky.
It is possible to apply this ‘social construction critique’ to a range of statistics – such as crime stats, unemployment stats, immigration stats, happiness stats, and a whole load more, which means that while there may be a really existing social world external to the individual, it’s not necessarily possible to know or measure that world with any degree of certainty or to understand how all of the various social facts out there interact with each other. NB This may well explain why no one seems to be able to make predictions about economic crashes, Arab Springs, or election results these days!
Other critics, such as phenomenologists (kind of like precursors to Postmodernists), argue that the whole concept of an external reality is itself flawed, and that instead of one external reality which constrains individuals there are a multitude of more fluid and diverse social realities which arise and fade with social interaction. From this perspective, we may think there is a system of social norms and values out there in the world, but this is only ‘real’ for us if we think it to be real; this is nothing more than a thought, and thus in ‘reality’ we are really free as individuals. (Monstrously free, if you like, to coin a phrase.)
Do Social Facts Exist?
Durkheim’s view of society and the Positivist method have been conceived over 100 years ago, and it has been severely criticised by Interpretivists and Postmodernists, but this hasn’t stopped many researchers from adopting a quantitative, scientific approach to analysing social trends and social problems at the level of society rather than at the level of the individual, and there does seem to be something in the view that society constrains us in subtle and often unnoticed ways, many of which you would’ve come across over the two year A level sociology course.
The suicide rate still varies according to various social factors (‘social facts’?)
For example, after noting that the male suicide rate is 3 times higher than the female suicide rate, and highest for men in their late 40s, This 2016 suicide report by the Samaritans (UK focus) notes that ‘Research suggests that social and economic factors influence the risk of suicide in women as well as men’
Hence as Durkheim said in the 19th century, the decision to kill yourself isn’t just a personal decision, it’s influenced by whether your’re male or female and your age. (As a 43 year old male, I don’t find this graph particularly encouraging, then again at least I’m into ‘the hump’ rather than staring at it from my 30s and with only 8 years of shit to go.)
The birth rate/ total fertility rate seem to be effected by a number of ‘social facts’
Think back to the module on the family – while the decision to have babies seems personal and private, the number of children women have, and the age at which they have them seems to be influenced heavily by society. The decline in the birth rate is now a global trend – and while there are different ’causes’ which have led to its reduction, some of the more common ones appear to be women’s empowerment and education , economic growth and state-promoted family planning.
According to the The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) there are a number of factors that can play a role in a country’s fertility rates, including its investment in education, the availability of family planning services, the status of women’s rights and the prevalence of early and forced marriage.
“Population dynamics are not destiny,” the UNFPA’s population matters report says. “Change is possible through a set of policies which respect human rights and freedoms and contribute to a reduction in fertility, notably access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, education beyond the primary level, and the empowerment of women.”
Educational achievement still varies enormously by (the social fact of) social class background
It’s depressing to have to remind you about it, but from the Education module you learnt that social class background has a profound impact on educational achievement. The graph below shows achievement by FSM pupils compared to all other pupils. ‘FSM’ stands for ‘Free School Meals’ – to qualify for FSM status a child needs to be in approximately the bottom sixth of households by income -NB FSM is only a proxy for social class, one indicator of it, the only one we have to hand which is convenient. (The government doesn’t collect information on social class and educational achievement for ideological reasons).
Keep in mind that this is the bottom sixth by income compared to all other pupils. If you separated out the top sixth, you’d probably see a 90% 5 A-C achievement rate (or something like that).
Again if you think back to the lessons on material and cultural deprivation, coming from a poor background seems to weigh heavily on ‘poor kids’ while coming from a middle class background confers material and cultural advantage on the children of wealthier parents. Sad to say but educational results in England and Wales are most definitely NOT a reflection of just intelligence.
One of the best examples of a Positivist approach to social research carried out in recent years is ‘The Spirit Level’ by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.– a study of the effects of wealth and income inequality on a whole range of social problems
Chapter by chapter, graph by graph, the authors demonstrate that the more unequal a rich country is,the worse its performance is likely to be in a whole range of variables including:
life expectancy
infant mortality
obesity
child wellbeing
amount of mental illness
use of illegal drugs
teenage pregnancy rates
homicide and imprisonment rates
levels of mutual trust between citizens
maths and literacy attainment
social mobility (children rising in social scale compared with their parents)
spending on foreign aid
The authors consider and eliminate other possibilities, and conclude:
‘It is very difficult to see how the enormous variations which exist from one society to another in the level of problems associated with low social status can be explained without accepting that inequality is the common denominator, and a hugely damaging force.”
Inequalities erode “social capital”, that is, the cohesion of a society, the degree to which individual citizens are involved in their society, the strength of the social networks within it, and the degree of trust and empathy between citizens.
The mechanisms by which inequality impacts on societies, it is suggested, is that individuals internalise inequality, that their psyches are profoundly affected by it, and that that in turn affects physical as well as mental health, and leads to attitudes and behaviours which appear as a variety of social and health problems.’
So if you’ve got an anxiety disorder, blame Thatcher, she’s the one whose government kick started the march towards inequality.
Social Facts… In summary
According to Durkheim (a French dude from the 19th century), society exists at a level above the individual and it kind of has a life of its own. It consists of social facts such as institutions and the class structure which constrain individuals depending on their relation to said social facts.
Durkheim believed that we should limit ourselves to studying ‘social facts’ at the level of society – aim to understand how and why social trends vary, and do this in a scientific way.
Understanding more about how these social forces drive social change, and deriving the laws which govern human interaction is the point of sociology according to Durkheim, and doing this requires us to study social facts at the level of society, there is no need to focus on individuals.
Some of the findings of this type of research based on social facts include…….
Being male, 40-50, poor, and divorced means you are more miserable and more likely to kill yourself (Oh yeah, I’m not poor, or divorced, so yay I’m OK!)
Economic growth, female empowerment, and family planning policies have led to women having fewer babies
Being from a poor household means you’re much more likely to get crap CGSEs
The more unequal a country in terms of wealth and income the worse of everyone is in pretty much every way imaginable, especially those at the bottom.
So that’s all pretty useful, right? Basically we need to make the world more equal, empower more women, and help poor children and middle aged men more and everything’ll be a whole lot better….
Green and Ward (2005) define state crime as ‘illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by the state, or with the complicity of state agencies’. State crimes are committed by, or on behalf of nation states in order to achieve their policies.
So WHO can commit state crime?
According to the above definition anyone working for the State who engaged in illegal activities in order to achieve state policies.
The State is what the government runs – (one analogy is that governments are like the crew, the state is like the ship) – so this means any politician or civil servant doing anything deviant or illegal to pursue national policies in any sphere – be it health care, social welfare, education, military engagement, or crime control itself.
The inclusion of ‘state agencies’ means it is not just politicians or civil servants who can commit state crime, it is also public sector workers such as the armed forces or the police, or doctors, teachers, ANYONE who does anything illegal when working in an official context to achieve government policy, IF I’m reading the definition correctly (this is a tricky concept so I might not be!)
NB a teacher or a doctor stealing something from their workplace probably wouldn’t be an example of a state crime as this act wouldn’t help a nation state achieved its policies, and I’m not sure if a politician fiddling their expenses would count, because you could say EVERYTHING a politician does is related to achieving policy – MPs are the representation of the state, so anything deviant or illegal they do in office MIGHT count as a State Crime?
In the examples below HOWEVER, I’ll try to avoid individual crimes which individuals do for primarily for their own benefit, so as to ensure every example is as clear cut as can be, just be clear (ironically) that there are definitely grey areas in defining state crime, VERY large grey areas!
Some Examples of State Crime
State crimes include some of the WORST crimes in human history in terms of the harm done to individuals and societies, both in terms of the NUMBER of people affected and the suffering inflicted on those individuals.
Examples of state crimes include….
Genocide
War crimes
Torture
Funding organised crime and terrorist groups
Assassinations
Corruption
Discrimination
Types of State Crime
McLaughlin (2001) identifies four categories of state crime:
• Crimes by security forces – e.g. genocide, torture, imprisonment without trial and disappearance of dissidents
• Political Crimes – e.g. censorship or corruption
• Economic crimes – e.g. violation of health and safety laws
• Social and cultural crimes – e.g. institutional racism
These four categories allow us to be a little bit more analytical in studying State Crime – certainly to my mind the first category stands out as by far the more serious type of crime in terms of harm caused.
Below I provide some further examples of some of the crimes committed by States in the first two categories above. (This isn’t to say categories three and four aren’t worth studying, but there’s only so much time we can spend on this in an A-level course!)
Crimes of Security – Genocide
Genocide means any act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group or Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Source – teaching genocide –).
Three of the best known genocides include The Holocaust, The Cambodian Genocide and The Rwandan Genocide
The Holocaust was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the deadliest genocides in history. Every arm of Germany’s bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide. Other victims of Nazi crimes included Romanis, ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate victims for slave labour, mass murder, and other human rights abuses. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators.
In Cambodia, a genocide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime led by Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 in which an estimated one and a half to three million people died. The KR had planned to create a form of agrarian socialism which was founded on the ideals of Stalinism and Maoism. The KR policies of forced relocation of the population from urban centres, torture, mass executions, use of forced labour, malnutrition, and disease led to the deaths of an estimated 25 percent of the total population (around 2 million people).
The Rwandan Genocide was a genocidal mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority. During the approximate 100-day period from April 7 to mid-July 1994, an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, constituting as much as 70% of the Tutsi and 20% of Rwanda’s total population. The genocide was planned by members of the core political elite known as the akazu, many of whom occupied positions at top levels of the national government. Perpetrators came from the ranks of the Rwandan army, the National Police, government-backed militias and the Hutu civilian population.
Political Crimes – Corruption
Political corruption can take various forms, but the most common examples appear to be politicians siphoning public money off to their private bank accounts, unfairly granting government contracts in return for bribes and electoral fraud (vote rigging).
According to the Corruption Index put together by Transparency International there seems to be a correlation between corruption, war and conflict and poverty – Somalia, North Korea, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq come out bottom of the Corruption Index, while the usual suspects – the Scandinavian countries plus Canada come out as the least corrupt.
To give you an example of how blatant corruption can get take the case of Teodoro Mbasogo who is the leader of Equatorial Guinea, one of the world’s poorest countries, but is also paradoxically one of the world’s wealthiest heads of state, with an estimated net worth of $600 million. For perspective, Barack Obama has a net worth of about $11.8 million.
Equatorial Guinea, despite having some of Africa’s largest oil reserves, has one of the most underdeveloped infrastructures and poorest populations in the world – so where does the money go?
The answer, at least from the outside, seems to be directly from the corporate accounts of Exxon Mobil and other oil companies straight into the pockets of Obiang and his family. In 2003, Obiang announced that to combat corruption in public service jobs, he would be taking full control of the national treasury. He then withdrew half a billion dollars (that’s billion with a B) in state money from the national treasury and deposited it into accounts in his own name at Riggs Bank, based in Washington D.C., effectively siphoning off all of the state’s money into his own pocket.
In addition to draining the country’s accounts, he’s also been implicated in various human rights abuses, electoral fraud, nepotism, and using security contractors to maintain control over the country.
Of course corruption doesn’t just happen in less developed countries – In 2009, the MP’s expenses scandal erupted in the UK, where numerous members of parliament and members of the house of Lords were found to be claiming expenses dishonestly. This resulted in 8 successful criminal prosecutions, any many more resignations, although most of the MPs got away with very minor punishments, as with Derek Conway MP who only received a 10 day suspension for paying his Son, Freddie, thousands of pounds for apparently doing nothing.
State Crime and Human Rights
One thing that has made it easier to hold states accountable is the emergence of the of the United Nations after the second world war, which developed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – developed after world war two, designed to protect individual citizens from oppressive regimes – this is legally binding on member states.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains a list of freedoms which states are supposed to protect such as…
Article 4 – No one shall be held in slavery or servitude
Article 5 – No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
Article 20 – Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association
Article 24 – Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable working hours and holidays with pay.
The Scale of State Crime/ Human Right’s Abuses
The fact that Nation State’s maintain power and control over large territories and populations mean that they have the potential to engage in large scale crimes which victimise extremely large numbers of people – for example the Cambodian Genocide in the 1970s is estimated to have wiped out 25% of the population.
McLaughlin, Eugene (2001) Political violence, terrorism and states of fear. In, Muncie, John and McLaughlin, Eugene (eds.) The Problem of Crime. Second Edition. London, GB. SAGE Publications. (LINK but no details!)
Ian Taylor, writing from a socialist perspective, argues that economic globalisation (basically the spread of Capitalism) has led to more crimes being committed by elites – crimes which go unnoticed in the West
In ‘The Political Economy of Crime’ (1998) Ian Taylor wrote about important changes in the world economy in recent years, many of which have accelerated since he wrote the book. Three of these are covered below: The problems of global finance and tax havens, the problem of Transnational Corporations and ‘Law Evasion’ and the problem of increasing inequality caused by globalisation.
Global Finance, Tax Havens and Tax Evasion
For Elites, the ability to move finance around the world with minimal control enables a whole range of financial crimes, from tax evasion and insider trading to defrauding transnational organisations such as the EU out of grant and subsidy money. According to one 2012 estimate, the Global Super Rich have $21 trillion dollars squirrelled away in offshore bank accounts which are evading tax.
The existence of tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands, also allows organised crime gangs to launder the profits from illegal activities such as drugs production and distribution, because of said lose controls over capital movements.
Transnational Corporations and Law Evasion
The last half a century has seen many Transnational Corporations shift their production to developing countries in search for greater profitability. One of the reasons they do this is because poorer countries tend to have fewer environmental regulations, and so corporations can pollute more freely in those countries. Not having to clean up your mess is good for profits.
TNCs often subcontract out their production processes to various local companies – subcontracting encourages the employment of people who are working illegally, because it is often cheaper to hire illegal immigrants because they are prepared to work for less. This often happens in clothing, food and building industries. Subcontractors break rules to cut costs in order to get and retain contracts in competitive industries and to maximise their profits.
The Case Study of Union Carbide in Bhopal, the biggest industrial accident in world history, illustrates the problem of law evasion and corporate irresponsibility perfectly. Union Carbide, an American owned multi-national company, set up a pesticide plant in Bhopal in order to take ad-vantage of the cheap labour in India. In 1984, the plant accidentally leaked deadly gas fumes into the surrounding atmosphere. The leakage resulted in over 3500 deaths and caused permanent injury to at least a further 25 000. Investigations have since revealed that the company set up this particular plant because pollution controls in India were less rigid than in the USA and the escape of gas was caused by inadequate safety procedures at the plant, making this a criminal case of negligence.
Campaigners say Bhopal has an unusually high incidence of children with birth defects and growth deficiency, as well as cancers, diabetes and other chronic illnesses. These are seen not only among survivors of the gas leak but among people born many years later, they say.
Twenty years ago Union Carbide paid $470m (£282m) in compensation to the Indian government, and in 2010 (26 years after the disaster) 8 people (all Indian) were sentenced for 2 years for their crimes of negligence. No one on the board of the company has faced criminal charges.
Examples of corporations which have caused social or environmental harm due to law evasion (moving to a poorer country to cut costs)
1. Apple (in China)
2. Shell (in Nigeria)
3. Primark (in Bangladesh)
Increasing Global Inequality and Crime
The staggering extent of global inequality is one of the major causes of International Crime. Wealth in the developed world increases demand for global goods and services, and poverty in the developing world creates supply of criminal products and services.
On the demand side – In developed countries and among the wealthier segments of the population in developing countries, consumer culture pressurizes people into buying more and more material items and to engage in more and more leisure pursuits – and there literally billions of consumers in the world: the sheer volume of consumers means there is enormous demand for a huge range of products. Most people want to get these products and services as cheaply as possible, and getting hold of things through the global black market is often the cheapest way to keep up with consumerist pressure – illegally imported cigarettes and alcohol are cheaper than their taxed legal alternatives, and sleeping with a trafficked prostitute in Estonia is cheaper than paying for one in the UK.
The demand for outright illegal products such as drugs, guns and human organs (in Europe at least) is much smaller, but simply given the high numbers of people involved in the global consumer market place, it only takes a tiny percentage of people to generate significant levels of demand for such products.
On the supply side – In poorer, developing countries, providing illegal goods for shipment to wealthier people can be more lucrative than producing something legally. In Columbia for example it is estimated that 20% of the population depend on the Cocaine trade, which is more profitable than growing coffee, while in Afghanistan growing opium poppies, the basis of heroine, has remained the country’s largest export and the main source of income for the population during three decades of conflict.
In other poor countries where the climate isn’t conducive to growing drugs for export to the west, other illegal opportunities can be attractive – such as selling your children into a life of prostitution or other forms of slavery through human trafficking networks.
A further effect of TNCs being mobile is that they have reduced job security of full time staff and this increases the amount of part time, temporary and insecure employment, which in turn breeds the conditions for criminality.
The causes of the civil war in Syria
Keep in mind that this is the bottom sixth by income compared to all other pupils. If you separated out the top sixth, you’d probably see a 90% 5 A-C achievement rate (or something like that).
