Why is the clear up rate for crime in the UK so low…?

Only one in 20 offenders in the UK get charged. This is because of two main reasons: Tory funding cuts leading to declining police numbers and the increasingly complex nature of crime.

Only one in 20 offenders now get charged, according to a recent BBC Panorama documentary: Will my Crime get Solved…? For burglaries, only 4% of home burglars are charged.

And in 39% of crimes police fail altogether to identify a suspect. 

The documentary does the ususual job of combining case studies and interviews with experts who drill down into the statistics. 

The case studies are with three victims who haven’t had their crimes cleared up. In two of the cases the victims have even done their own work identifying the criminals. However the police haven’t pursued prosecutions in either case, despite having clear evidence. 

Why is there such a low clear up rate for crimes in the UK?

It isn’t due to rising crime rates overall. Most crimes have decreased over the last few decades according to the Crime Survey of England and Wales. Despite the low prosecution rates, burglary is falling, for example. 

However, two crimes in particular have increased: cybercrime and sexual related violence, mainly against women. 

Both of these crimes are very difficult to get prosecutions for, which goes some way to explain the very low clear up rates for crime. 

Cyber crime has increased dramatically in recent years, and is very difficult to solve because the perpetrators are often unknown, and quite possibly based abroad in the case of organised cybercrime. 

Sexual violence has seen an increase in reporting but it can be difficult to get prosecutions and victims are unwilling to to pursue the peretators in the courts because of fear of retribution, shame, and the historically low chances of getting a successful prosecution 

A second reason for the low clear up rates for crime is that the police are overstretched and increasingly inexperienced. Tory cuts to police funding saw 20 000 police officers leave the force after 2010. These have now been replaced but with younger and less experienced officers. 

And this now less experienced cohort of officers have to deal with increasingly complex crimes compared to a decade ago. This means more time is being spent on cyber crime, sex crimes, but not only that, more police time is being spent on dealing with global crimes too. 

This means that crimes such as burglary have been pushed to the back of the priority list. The police today are under increased pressure given their numbers and lack of experience. 

Public confidence in the police in the UK is at an all-time low.

Relevance to A-level sociology 

This is very relevant to left-realist criminology which argues victims should be put first when it comes to policing strategies. This evidence suggests such an approach is not working and victims are being let down. With such very low clear up rates, public trust in the police is at an all time low, and left-realist approaches rely on the public trusting and working with the police. 

It also shows us how the police are struggling to cope with the changing nature of crime. 

It is also possibly evidence of how neither left nor right realist approaches to tackling crime control are relevant today. Crime is increasingly global and complex and maybe new and innovative crime control measures are required. 

Sources…

Declining Trust in the Police

Kweku Adoboli… From Rogue Trader to Critique of the Banking System…

Kweku Adoboli was convicted in 2013 of the largest fraud in British history. While working for UBC bank as a trader he disguised the amount of risk his trades were exposing the bank to by creating fake hedging trades which could have minimised losses.

He ended up losing the bank £2.3 billion, plead guilty to fraud and was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 2013.

He served 3.5 years, and then spent another couple of years unsuccessfully trying to avoid being deported to Ghana. This is despite the fact that he’d spent most of his life living in the U.K where his family and friends were also based. However he never bothered getting U.K. Citizenship and this meant it was easy for the U.K. government to deport him once he’d become a convicted criminal. He was eventually deported in 2018.

This TED video is worth a watch where he outlines his side of the story…

Was he a scapegoat…?

While Adoboli took responsibility for the the losses he incurred, he says this was because of his Quaker upbringing: you own responsibility as part of your duty to the community.

The problem is that UBS didn’t have the same sense of duty to him.

Adoboli says the bank was fine with his risk-taking when he was making the bank money, and much of the time sorting out other people’s problems. He says all that he was doing was working within the logic of the banking system to make them more money.

But as soon as this problem occurred they blamed him for the bank’s losses and put it all on him.

In reality, it was the culture of banking that was the problem. Adoboli’s job it turns out was sit between wealthy clients and the bank and make ETF trades to help clients avoid tax. That was his job, to basically shaft society for the sake of the rich, and he had to take risks to do that.

He now thinks banks encourage people to lose site of morality and just focus on making money without thinking about the consequences.

He maybe has a point, that it was the banking system that encouraged him to do what he did, even if he took responsibility.

Britain is a backward country…

Following his deportation he is also very critical of Britain. He sees it as a country in decline that is looking backwards. It is scared, closing its borders, and we see that today in the anti-immigration stance taken by the country.

Britain is also a country of blocked opportunities for young black men, which becomes obvious when you look at the ethnicity and crime statistics.

In contrast he thinks African countries such as Ghana have a chance to develop more inclusive democracies which empower young people.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is just an update on the biggest white collar fraudster in British history. It’s interesting to hear his side of the story, rather than just the narrow media agenda.

To find out more you can see Kweku’s own website.

Michelle Mone, and the PPE Rip-off: A Rare overt example of the extractivist attitude of the elite..?

During Lockdown in 2020 Baroness Mone used her contacts to help set up a contract to provide PPE equipment worth £220 million between the Department of Health and a newly founded company established by her husband, PPE Medpro.

The company provided gowns for the astronomical sum of £120 million, but they were unusable, and Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, made a profit of £60 million.

The government is suing the company for that £120 million but Mone and her husband say they will defend themselves. As far as they are concerned, they have the right to keep that profit they made for providing substandard goods.

They effectively are going public saying they have right to keep £60 million of public money for effectively providing nothing.

They think they have the right to profit off the back of an unprecedented national crisis and essentially from the suffering of others.

A rare example of the elite admitting their extractivist logic…?

While the shameless attitude of these two multimillionaires may seem shocking, from a Marxist perspective, this is how the elite works all the time.

The only thing unusual about this case is that here we have two members of the elite openly saying how they operate in relation to the State and the general public.

This is the naked business of capitalism: exploit people to make a profit and this is precisely what Mone and her husband have done.

They have taken advantage of a crisis to make £60 million. They have taken advantage of her networks in politics, which is the point of politics for the elite.

Their existence is not to provide public goods, it is to extract as much as they can from the State and the general public, and that is what they have done.

According to Marxism this is what most members of the capitalist class do. This is simply capitalism as usual. What is unusual is the extremity of the case: to have made so much money for providing basically nothing, because the gowns they produced were unusable.

Maybe this explains why they are so brazen: because they are being singled out, whereas all their elite buddies are getting away with extracting and going under the radar.

They are annoyed, not because they feel guilty for profiting of other people’s suffering, but because they are the minority of the elite who have got singled out doing what for them is perfectly normal!

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is a great example to illustrate the problems of capitalism and the continued relevance of Marxism today.

It’s also an example which supports the Marxist theory of crime. As far as I can see, these two awful human beings haven’t done anything technically illegal. However they have caused huge harm to the public. Marxism suggests we should look at harms rather than crimes.

From fear of crime to a general concern about safety and security

The British public today are not so much concerned about crime in the classic sense of the word. They aren’t so worried about being victims of burglary, or theft, or street violence for example. 

People today are less concerned about their chances of being a victim of formally defined crimes. People are more concerned about a broader and more general range of social problems which more subtly undermine their feelings of safety and security. 

For example, people today are more likely to be worried about:

  • Low level bullying such as with children at school. 
  • Gender based harassment, violence and abuse, including grooming. 
  • Hate crimes such as racism.
  • The effects of climate change, so environmental harms. 
  • Immigration and the effects this has on local social cohesion. 
  • People trafficking and human slavery. 

With the possible exception of climate change, not everyone is going to be immediately affected by the above harms. However people are more aware that they exist and that such things are going on in their neighbourhoods. None of these harms are as public or obvious as ‘classic’ crimes such as vandalism, street violence, or thefts. 

The increased awareness that these social harms are part of everyday social life has created a growing sense of unease among many people. 

From fear of crime  in the 1990s to a general concern about safety and security in the 2020s. 

Back in the late 1990s in Britain people were more concerned about ‘classic crimes’ such as burglary and car theft. The crime discourse at that time was largely shaped by mainstream television and newspapers as well as face to face contact. One Ipsos-Mori poll from the mid 1990s showed that 41% of people listed crime (and reducing crime) as one of the three biggest problems facing Britain at that time. 

These findings were largely backed up by a study conducted by Girling et al (2000): Crime and Social Change in Middle England. This was a two year qualitative study of people’s feelings about crime and policing in Macclesfield. (Selected because it was a reasonably affluent, small town where crime wasn’t an immediate day to day problem.) People naturally talked about being concerned about being victims of car theft and feeling threatened by groups of young people hanging out on the street. 

The researchers revisited Macclesfield more recently and found that people were no longer concerned about classic crimes. What they expressed was a complex and varied sense of unease about the issues mentioned in the previous section. 

Why are people more concerned about safety and security today?

People’s increasing sense of unease and susceptibility to feeling insecure is related to the following social changes:

  • Economic growth and then collapse in 2008 has made us feel more vulnerable in general. There is more of a sense that what we have gained can also be lost. 
  • The rise of digital media. The previous 2000 study was done before the age of digital media. Today people access the social world online, meaning a very different, varied, and risk-on public landscape.  
  • Climate change has become much more of a visible issue. 
  • Brexit brought the issue of migration to public attention. 
  • The Pandemic made us more aware of domestic abuse. 

The way the State responds to more global threats such as global terrorism, through increasing surveillance of certain types of people, can also affect how some people experience security issues today. 

Implications 

The idea of fear of crime seems to have had its day. We need to focus on people’s more general sense of danger and difficulty in their daily lives and how they seek safety and security. 

Traditional victim surveys such as the Crime Survey of England and Wales have tended to measure people’s fear of specific crimes in public spaces, such as fear of being assaulted in public or fear of social disorder. These are possibly no longer fit for purpose! 

We shouldn’t make any presumptions about what people are concerned about. What people are worried about varies. It might be anything from how going online opens them up to potential harm in the form of scams, or risk of flooding due to climate change. 

In this sense security can be conceptualised as ‘a set of political practices, governmental speech acts mobilised to justify decisive, speedy, exceptional measures in the face of what is presented as a conceptual threat’. 

Radical Criminology, aka New or Critical Criminology

Emerging in the late 1960s and 70s, Radical Criminology, aka New Criminology combined Marxist and Interactionist approaches, emphasizing capitalism’s role in producing crime, and the subsequent societal reactions. It called for understanding crime through several factors such as wealth distribution and societal response to deviance. Critics argue it offers no practical solution to crime and romanticizes criminals, while ignoring crime victimization of women.

Radical, new or critical criminologies of the late 1960s and 1970s had their basis in Marxism, Libertarianism, anarchism or American populism. 

They sought to understand crime control by referring to power, politics and inequalities and emphasised the need for political activism or praxis. 

Chambliss (1976, Box 1983) saw crime control as an oppressive and mystifying force. Legislation and law enforcement and ideological stereotyping preserved unequal class relations. 

The radical political economy of crime sought to expose the hegemonic ideologies that masked the real nature of crime and repression in capitalist societies. 

Most mundane offending was less harmful than exploitation, alienation, racism and pollution. 

Much proletarian crime could be redefined as a form of rebellion or redistributive class justice. Or the possessive individualism endemic to capitalist society. 

Criminal justice itself created visible crowds of working-class black scapegoats to deflect attention away from a capitalist system in terminal crisis. 

If the working classes did turn to crime they were themselves victims of false consciousness which inflated the nature of petit problems while hiding harms the bourgeoisie did. 

Black prisoners were the victims of race wars, prison the ultimate form of state repression. 

Most people were unaware of how power worked and it was the job of the radical criminologist to demystify. 

Socialism was the answer to the problem of crime.  

The New Criminology

In 1973 Taylor, Walton and Young published The New Criminology which combined Marxist and Interactionist approaches to crime.  They argued criminologists should examine all the different aspects surrounding why a crime takes place – the immediate and wider political reasons as well the societal reaction.   

They argued criminologists should examine how capitalism generates the circumstances of crime, the responses of the police, media, criminal justice system, offender and victim, and how all of these factors interact to influence how the situation develops. 

New Criminologists argued that criminals were lashing out against capitalism, in fact they say that they were mistakenly expressing their anger at capitalism through crime, rather than politics.  They also argued the media created moral panics and scapegoats about particular crimes to divert attention away from issues which may potentially be damaging to the ruling classes.

Book cover: the New Criminology
The New Criminology, published 1973.

The New Criminology was similar to Marxism….

  1. It accepted that the key to understanding crime is the material basis of society – the economy is the most important part.
  2. Believed that capitalist societies are unequal and these inequalities are the root of crime.
  3. Supported a radical change of society – theories of crime are useless unless they offer hope to liberate people from oppression. 

The New Criminology also criticised previous criminological theorising…

  • Marx was too economically deterministic. Taylor et al insist that criminals choose to break the law. External forces do not determine human behaviour.  
  • They dismissed most causal theories of crime and saw control, labelling, and biological theories as too determinist. They believed crimes were deliberate and conscious acts with political motives. 
  • Deviants were not just the passive victims of capitalism, they were engaged in active political struggle. 
  • They wanted socialism not communism. They envisaged a society where hippies, LGBTQ people, and maybe even drug users would be accepted and not turned into criminals. 

The Fully Social Theory of Deviance 

Taylor, Walton and Young developed the Fully Social Theory of Deviance to emphasise seven factors we need to look at to fully understand crime. 

To understand Crime fully we need to look at..

  1. The way in which wealth and power is distributed in society. Here we need to look at the Crimogenic Capitalist system and cyclical economic crises within Capitalism. Also the role of the state in oppressing and marginalising certain groups.
  2. The particular circumstances surrounding the decision of an individual to commit an act of deviance
  3. The deviant act itself and the meaning the individual deviant attaches to it. 
  4. How and why other people in society react to deviance – how do family members, friends and the police react? We also need to look at the media’s power to create ‘folk devils’ 
  5. The reaction needs to be explained in terms of the social structure. How do the public and the police respond to the creation of folk devils ? (the societal reaction)? More broadly, who has the power to make the rules? Why do agents of social control punish some deviant acts more severely than others?
  6. The effect labelling has on the people being labelled. How do  the ‘criminalised’ respond to being labelled?
  7. All of the above together. 

Stuart Hall applied this approach to his study of mugging in the 1970s.  He found that the Government wanted to divert attention away from the economic crisis of the time, so a moral panic was created about black youths in London.  

Criticisms of Radical Criminology. 

Critical Criminology offers us no realistic solution to the problem of crime – if it is Capitalism and the state that are the problems – then a revolution is the only answer. Radical criminology did not receive government funded ‘soft money’ for empiricist research. Some departments closed down. 

It was too idealistic. It is based on some idealised vision of a free future. All capitalist societies are not the same an socialism can be repressive. 

The New Criminology romanticised criminals. In reality most criminals are not struggling against their oppressors in the name of political change, they are just thugs. 

Victim surveys of the 1970s and 80s showed the extent of working class victimisation. They showed us that crime was intra-class, not inter-class. In other words the working classes victimised other working class people, hardly a class struggle against the elite! They ignored the impact street crimes can have on Victims – Left Realism in particular gets back to a ‘victim centred’ approach to crime

They also ignored the victimisation of women. 

The legacy of New Criminology 

Reflecting back on Radical Criminology in the late 1990s, new criminologists accepted some of the criticisms, especially from Feminism. 

In defence of New Criminology they pointed out that it stood up against correctionalism. It encouraged agents of social control to not eradicating deviant behaviour, and encouraged more tolerance!

New Criminology does have a critical legacy. Feminism, Left Realism and Postmodernism are all rooted in the New Criminology . 

Signposting and relevance to A-level sociology

This content is relevant to the crime and deviance aspect of A-level sociology.

The Opioid Crisis in the United States: A Corporate Crime?

Drug overdose deaths in the US, notably opioid overdoses, skyrocketed from under 10,000 per year in the 1980s to 100,000 in 2021. The crisis began with the FDA’s approval of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin Painkiller in 1995, claimed as non-addictive without proper evidence. Subsequent aggressive marketing led to widespread addiction. Labeled as criminal acts of profit-driven corporations and a co-opted FDA, these actions resulted in significant damage with a reported 1 million deaths and cost of $2 trillion, prompting sanctions and funding to combat the crisis.

For most of the 1980s drug overdose deaths in the United States were fairly steady, well under 10 000 deaths per year. 

Then, in the 1990s, deaths rose sharply. By 2000 nearly 20 000 people were dying from overdoses annually. In 2021 the number peaked at 100, 000, a 500% increase over the decade. 

To put this in context, over the past 25 years more than a million people in the U.S. have died from drug overdoses. This is more people than died in both world wars combined. 

Most of these deaths are caused by opioid overdoses. These deaths are from both natural opiates such as morphine and heroin, and synthetic compounds which have similar properties. 

When did the opioid crisis begin?

The crisis began with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin Painkiller drug in 1995. This drug was designed to be slow release. Purdue claimed that the slow release design would prevent it from being addictive. However, they made this claim without proper evidence. They conducted no clinical trials on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. 

Image of box of Oxycontin pills.
Oxycontin

Before the release of OxyContin opioids had been used only in limited cases. They were only administered to cancer patients, those undergoing more invasive surgery and for end-of-life pain relief. 

However Purdue engaged in aggressive direct marketing campaigns to doctors. The company encouraged Doctors to prescribe OxyContin for less serious conditions such as arthritis, back pain and sports injuries. 

What effect did OxyContin have?

Prescriptions peaked in 2012 at more than 255 million in the U.S. that year. OxyContin, and other similar opioids such as Vicodin create a huge new class of addicts. By 2011 OyxContin was the leading cause of drug-related deaths in the US. 

This is known as the first wave of the crises which also drove the second wage. Many addicts found prescription pain killers too expensive or too difficult to buy and so turned to heroin.  Interviews with injecting urban drug users Between 2008-09 found that 86% of them had used prescription painkillers first. The illegal heroine trade expanded greatly because of this, as did the number of heroin overdoses. 

In 2013 came the third crisis. This was caused by illegal, synthetic opioids such as Fentanyl which is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. This led to a huge increase in overdose deaths as the strength of the final street product varied widely. 

Why did the crisis happen?

There are several causes, all of which seem fundamentally linked to the Marxist theory of crime…

The chief executives of Purdue Pharma were primarily concerned with making profit, rather than the safety of people. They didn’t do proper trials to check the risks of addiction and sold their product hard to doctors. 

The Food and Drug Administration had been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry. The FDA regulatory who oversaw the approval of Oxy, Dr Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterwards and took a job at Purdue. 

The U.S. healthcare system prefers prescribing rather than other solutions. This is because it puts profits of corporations over the health and wellbeing of ordinary people. 

Many of these overdose deaths are deaths of despair. They are linked to social ills such as poverty, declining wages, and declining stability in social life. 

What is being done now?

The U.S. has tightened conditions for prescribing opioid Painkillers, but the levels are still high.

They have Sanctions on Chinese companies who make chemicals used to make Fentanyl, 

They have allocated $5 Billion for mental health care and treating addiction.

Analysis: supporting evidence for the Marxist perspective on crime…?

This seems to be a case study which strongly supports the Marxist theory of crime

It clearly shows that all classes commit crime. Here we have both the Corporate elite and the government working together. 

Marxism says the ‘crimes’ (or harms) the elite does are much greater than working class crime. With over 1 million dead as a result of Oxycontin this harmful act is extreme.  There were 100 000 overdose deaths in 2022 – 68% of them linked to Opiods, 2 million addicts, monetary cost $2 Trillion, misery can’t calculate. (According to the Stanford-Lancet Commission). 

The Sackler Family managed to get immunity from prosecution. They have to pay $8 billion in damages. However they have been given a number of years to pay this, and they will probably make that from returns on their investments.

Effectively they haven’t been punished for causing 1 million deaths.

Purdue Pharam and the Opioid crisis: find out more.

Netflix recently released an excellent series: Painkiller which covers this case study very well!

How do we explain the increase in retail crime?

Official crime statistics show that there were 33 000 shoplifting offences recorded in March, 31% more than last year.

This is in line with crime data reported by the Co-op, which reported a 35% increase year on year. In the six months to June, the group recorded 1000 incidents of crime every day across all its outlets.

The seriousness of these retail offences also seem to be getting worse. A higher proportion of crimes involve violence and some have involved gangs entering shops and looting.

This is reflective of an increase in retail crime more broadly. The 2022 crime report by the British Retail Consortium reported a more than doubling of violent crimes and abusive behaviour towards staff in 2020-21 compared to 2019-22.

Explaining the increase in retail crime

There are three possible explanations for the above crime trends:

Firstly the cost of living crisis will explain some of the increase in shoplifting. With more people dropping below the poverty line, some will turn to shoplifting. There are more people facing a choice of heating or eating, after all.

Secondly the police have been putting less focus on less serious offences. They have been screening out low-level offences so they can focus on more serious crimes.

When criminals know they are less likely to get caught, they are more likely to commit crime.

Finally, the increase in violent and anti-social offences during lockdown may be explained through increased stress when shopping. It is likely that many of these cases were caused by people getting upset by shortages and lockdown measures in shops.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material seems to support rational choice theory and right realism which are part of the crime and deviance module.

The UK’s illegal plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda

The criminals in the house of commons passed the UK government’s illegal migration bill last week.

The bill will prevent most migrants who enter the UK by small boats from claiming asylum in the UK. Instead they will be detained and some of them deported to Rwanda to claim asylum there instead. Rwanda agreed to a five year trial of this plan recently.

British courts ruled the Rwanda Plan illegal because it breaches article three of the European Convention on Human Rights (1).

UK migration bill in breach of EU convention of human rights, article 3.

Rwanda’s asylum policy is not as strict as the UKs. There is a higher chance some genuine claims for asylum will result in deportations back to countries of origin.

This means more people will be returned to countries where they risk death, imprisonment or other inhumane treatment.

The UK has not deported any migrants to date because the bill is currently not legal. However the government is appealing this decision.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is relevant to the crime and deviance module. It is an example of a state crime, by virtue of the British state going against international human rights.

It is also an example of the limits of globalisation. Here we have a nation state restricting the free movement of people. This is globalisation in reverse.

It is also possible to apply critical victimology to this case study. Asylum seekers are the most vulnerable people on the planet. The government is targeting them by putting in place this barrier.

Note that the government isn’t worried about 150 000 wealthy Chinese students studying in the UK. It is only poor migrants it is seeking to stop.

It is also an example of a government responding to a moral panic generated by the media.

The bill is nominally in response to the thousands of migrants entering the UK in small boats in recent years. Britain actually needs migrants, it is just the media who demonizes them, and here the government responds.

This is also going against public opinion. According to one poll conducted in 2023 56% of people think migration is good for Britain.

Sources

(1) Ruling against the Secretary of State’s Rwanda Plan.

Bullying and Sexual Harassment at McDonald’s

The BBC recently uncovered over 100 cases of sexual and racial harassment and bullying in McDonald’s Restaurants in the UK. (1)

Examples included older men groping younger women, aged as young as 16 and talking to them inappropriately sexual ways. Some workers were also the victims of racial and homophobic language.

In one case a manager simply told the victim to ignore the man harassing with her and get on with her job. In other other cases McDonald’s moved managers accused of harassing people to other restaurants.

In some cases it was the victims who felt their harassment claims had not been dealt with quit their jobs.

Personally I thought sacking the people doing the harassing would be the most effective way to make a victim feel comfortable at work again. It would also send out a strong message to other workers NOT to engage in such behaviour.

The law obliges McDonald’s to protect workers from such harassment in the workplace. However the law protecting victims of work based harassment is rather weaker than you might think!

Weak protections for victims of workplace harassment?

If you look at legal advice sites for employers it is clear that sacking the people doing the harassing is a last resort. In fact I get the impression that even in severe cases the harassers will be encouraged to quit rather than sacked.

Most of the advice focuses on suggesting employers provided adequate training for staff in equality and providing a clear code of conduct.

I guess there are so many sexist, racist and homophobic employees that if employees took every case of harassment seriously they’d be sacking a lot of people.

I imagine companies are also reluctant to sack harassers because of the investment they have made in them and the costs of rehiring.

This might also explain why there is so much focus on covering the employers’ in case a victim claims compensation against them.

It seems the legal advice surrounding dealing with harassment is more about saving companies money rather than protecting victims.

Signposting

This material is relevant to the Crime and Deviance module in the second year of A-level sociology.

Sources

(1) McDonald’s Workers Speak out Over Sexual Abuse Claims.

Abortion laws need updating!

A 44 year old mother of three was sentenced to 24 months in jail on Monday for using abortion pills to abort a foetus at just over 30 weeks, whereas the legal limit for abortions is currently 24 weeks.

She obtained the pills in March 2020 during Lockdown through the ‘pills by post scheme’ and lied to the authorities, saying she was under the 24 week limit. She got found out because she had to call emergency services having taken the pills, and the police were called by medical staff after she arrived in hospital.

She was prosecuted under the 1861 ‘Offences against the person act‘ which outlines a maximum possible life-sentence, but the judge residing stated she’d received the sentence for lying rather than the actual abortion, had she not lied he probably would have given her a non-custodial sentence.

abortion laws harming women uk

Relevance to A-level sociology

You can apply victimology here. It seems to me that this woman is a victim of unfortunate circumstances and an outdated criminal justice system.

She got pregnant during lockdown, when access to abortion services would have been restricted, and came to a late decision to abort, by which time the only way she could do what she thought was right was to lie to the authorities.

She basically did this under extreme stress in the middle of lockdown with a lack of support, and apparently has suffered huge emotional trauma as a result.

There seems to be consensus over the fact that she should have reproductive rights over her own body. Even the judge who sentenced her suggested the law needs to be changed.

I mean let’s face it: there are no legitimate arguments against this so this isn’t surprising. (Religious arguments aren’t rational thus not legitimate, because if they’re not rational they aren’t arguments, just faith-based opinions.)

There will obviously be a strong Feminist argument for changing the law here so such women can’t be prosecuted, I mean theoretically women can still go to jail for a life sentence for aborting a foetus at 25 weeks, and this is just overt state control over pregnant women’s bodies in modern Britain.

The fact that this law hasn’t been changed is a criticism of Liberal Feminism: clearly here social policy hasn’t been updated in so long that it’s not sufficient to protect such women when they need it!

Hopefully there will be an appeal very soon and this woman will get out of jail much earlier than 12 months (she’s serving half in jail), because her being in jail doesn’t serve any positive functions: not for society, not for her children and not for her.

Possibly the fact that this law hasn’t been updated for so long is because Parliament is still largely a patriarchal institution which is failing to adequately keep up to date with issues of gender justice.

I guess this also a test case for the Functionalist view that media reactions to laws will result in them changing, hopefully this will be the case here sooner rather than later!