Tag: crime

Analyse two reasons why men might commit more crime than women (10)

This is a possible ’10 mark with item question’ question which might come up on the AQA’s A level sociology crime and deviance with theory and methods paper (7192/3).

I’ve just got this intuitive feeling that IF a 10 mark question comes up on gender, it will ask candidates to focus on masculinity and male crime rather than female crime.

Below I include a question, with item and a suggested model answer…

10 Mark ‘with item’ Question

Read Item A, then answer the question below.

Item A

‘Normative masculinity’ is the socially approved ideal of what a ‘real man’ is. This involves being successful in terms of money and sexual conquests, being in control/exercising power. Messerschmitt argues that high levels of male crime are simply down to men trying to prove they are ‘real men’.

This goes some way to explaining white collar crime (mainly male) – it’s about status and competition. It might also also explain domestic violence and working class street violence – these are the means men with low status use to act out their masculinity when they lack power in mainstream society.

Using material from Item A, analyse two reasons why men might commit more crime than women (10)

Hints and Tips

  • Being successful: money, sex, in control, excercising power
  • normative (traditional) masculinity
  • Elite (white collar) crime
  • Low status crimes (WC street violence)
  • Also DV!

Suggested Model Answer

Firstly

  • Men might commit more crime than women because they believe that they need to be financially successful to prove they are a ‘real man’. The most obvious way a man can ‘act out’ this ‘traditional breadwinner’ aspect of his masculinity is to get a well-paid job.
  • However, according to Merton’s Strain Theory, not all men can achieve this goal through the legitimate means of getting a high paid job, as there are relatively few of these available, and as a result some will turn to crime in order ‘show they are successful’.
  • For some men this may ‘simply’ mean earning money by criminal means – by dealing drugs or doing ‘moped thefts’ for example – all of which seem to be mainly male pursuits.
  • Other men who lack the opportunity or ‘smartness’ to do utilitarian crime may just get frustrated and seek to prove their status and toughness through violence, as Winlow found with mainly working class men in Newcastle.
  • However, it isn’t just working class men who turn to crime to prove status: within companies some highly paid men turn to fraud to make even more money than their male peers.

Secondly…

  • Men might commit more crime than women to ‘prove they are in control of women’.
  • From a radical feminist perspective this is largely what explains domestic violence which happens across all class groups.
  • Heidensohn suggests DV is just one criminal way men express control in in private – it also happens in public through ‘harrassment’ on the streets
  • This is further perpetuated by ‘the male gaze’ and the objectification of women in the media, especially porn, all of which are interwoven in a network of patriarchal control over women.
  • However, men don’t necessarily just use sexual violence to control women, they also use it to control other men – male rape has been used against captured combatants in the DRC for example, and it can also be used in prisons where ‘situational homosexuality’ can be used as a means some men use to express their power over others.

 

 

Applying material from Item A, analyse two reasons why situational crime prevention strategies may not be effective in reducing crime (10)

My attempt at a model 10/10 answer for this A-level sociology exam question (crime and deviance topic)

This is the 10 mark question in the crime and deviance section of the AQA’s 2015 Specimen A-level sociology paper 3: Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods.

I used this question as part of our department’s own paper 3 mock exam this year (February 2018).

In this post I consider a ‘lower middle mark band’ student response (4/10 marks) to this question and the examiner commentary (both are provided by the AQA here) before considering what a ‘top band’ answer might look like.

The Question (with the item!)

sociology exam question

The Mark Scheme:

AQA sociology 10 mark question mark scheme.png

Student Response:

student response.png

Examiner Commentary: (4/10 marks)

sociology examiner commentary.png

A top band answer?

The first problem with situational crime prevention techniques such as installing burglar alarms is that they mail fail to increase the risk of getting caught in the subjective opinion of the burglars.

Many criminals are indeed rational and thus may reason that burglar alarms are ineffective – most members of the general public ignore them after all, and some may even be ‘fake’. There is also the fact that the police may take a long time to respond to an alarm, thus if criminals can act quickly enough, they may ‘calculate’ that they can get away with a smash and grab type robbery before the police respond, thus reducing the likelihood of getting caught.

A more effective form of situational crime prevention, other than a burglar alarm, might be a security guard, which would increase the risk of getting caught significantly as they can simply phone the police if there is any suspicious behaviour nearby.

However, security guards are expensive compared to alarms, and so while those places which hire security guards may be protected, crime will just be displaced to those areas with lesser protection (like ineffective alarms or no alarms’.

Finally, if we apply Felson’s ‘Routine Activity Theory’, we know that criminals ‘size up’ their targets when going about their day to day business, so they know the areas which are the least effectively protected and the least risky…. thus target hardening strategies like those mentioned in item are only going to be effective if all properties. use them equally, which is unlikely.

A second problem with Situational Crime Prevention talked about in item A is that not all crime is a rational decision, some crimes are done on the ‘spur of the moment’, for the ‘thrill of the act’, or out of sheer desperation.

Situational Crime Prevention failed, for example, to prevent the London Riots happening – here many of the rioters engaged in looting and vandalism in order to ‘have fun and join in with the party atmosphere’ despite the fact that all of the properties looted were locked and under surveillance, and there being thousands of police on the streets.

The Riots were also fueled by a sense of injustice at police brutality and economic inequality, which suggests that inequality in society ultimately fuels crime, which can spill-over at flash points, no matter how much one ‘hardens targets’: and target hardening does nothing to address the underlying causes of crime such as injustice and inequality.

Another example of a crime which is not rational is football hooliganism – which increasingly just seems to be about ‘fun’ – ‘teams’ of hooligans arrange fights after the match for thrills, and it is difficult to see how situational crime prevention can reduce this, as it’s just about ‘fun’ rather than ‘reward’ in the eyes of those involved.

 

Mexican government still struggling to control drugs cartels

There were 29,168 recorded murders in Mexico in 2017, or 20 murders for every 100, 000 of the population, more than at the height of the country’s drug war in 2011. (Source: The Guardian).

This dismal new record is being blamed on intense drug-related violence and turf wars – owing in particular to the rise and spread of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Jalisco Cartel

Analysts also believe the spike could be related to a number of autonomous groups emerging in the vacuum created by the capture of several major cartel bosses.

This is of obvious relevance to the Crime and Deviance aspect of A-level sociology – it demonstrates the continued power of organised (or dis-organised?) crime in countries through which drugs travel and the relative powerlessness of nation states to get this problem under control!

To put Mexico’s homicide rate in context, it’s more than 20* higher than the UKs, and yet smaller than Brazil’s and Colombia’s (27/ 100, 000) and El Salvador’s, which stands at 60.8 per hundred thousand.

Further sources used: 

The Week, 27 January 2017.

 

On teaching to a question – but what question to ask?

For teachers, ‘teaching to a question’ is often the most efficient way of organizing a lesson, and it’s something I found especially useful when I first began my teaching career, 146 years ago.

In this post all I’m doing is re-visiting this basic strategy in preparation for teaching the next block of theories of crime and deviance, and simply asking myself what are the best ‘starting point’ questions to get students thinking along the line of Marxists, Interactionists and Realists….

Any of these questions can be used as useful starters… as kind of ‘what do you already know’ starter if you like. You could always add in a brief data response task to each block of questions to bring them to life a bit more.

Marxist theories of crime – four basic questions

  • Does Capitalism cause crime?
  • Do the police disproportionately target the working classes?
  • Are elites more likely to escape prosecution by the courts than the working classes?
  • Do Corporations cause more harm to people, society and the planet than ‘actual’ criminals?

Interactionist theories of crime – four basic questions 

  • Do teachers/ the police label students/ people based on their class, gender and ethnicity?
  • Does this create a self-fulfilling prophecy?
  • Are teachers/ the police to blame for the deviance of their students/ the crimes of criminals?

Right Realist theories of crime – to tap into rational choice theory…..

  • Really simple..brainstorm anything the government might do to reduce crime in society (prize for the most solutions)
  • Any series of questions relating to ‘Rational Choice Theory’ (future post on this) – e.g. here’s a scenario, such as it being late at night, no guards, no ticket barrier, would you bunk the train…
  • All things being equal, do you think harsher punishments generally reduce crime?
  • All things being equal do you think more police on the streets is an effective way to reduce crime?

NB – the questions above aren’t supposed to be exhaustive, just the simpler ones to kick start the topics.

Sociology Teaching Resources for Sale

You might be interested in my latest (November 2019) teaching resource pack which contains everything teachers need to deliver 10 hour long ‘introduction to sociology’ lessons.

sociology teaching resourcesIncluded in the bundle is a clearly structured 50 page gapped student work-pack, six PowerPoints* to structure the 10 lessons, 10 detailed lesson plans outlining a range of learning activities you can use with students, a massive list of relevant contemporary resources with links, and numerous lesson activities including introductions, plenaries and links to some Socrative quizzes.

These resources contain all the core sociology knowledge students need for a through introduction sociology, illustrated with numerous up to date contemporary case studies and statistics.

The resources have been designed for A-level sociology and cover the core themes on the AQA’s specification but are suitable for new 16-19 students studying any specification.

You might also like these teaching resources for the sociology of education. They are specifically designed for A-level sociology students and consist of several versions of key concepts definitions (80 concepts in total), gapped summary grids with answers covering the entire sociology of education specification and 7 analysis activities.

If you want to get both of the above resources and receive regular updates of teaching resources then you can subscribe for £9.99 a month. I’ll be producing 10 hour long lessons worth of resources every month throughout 2020 and beyond. The £9.99 subscription means you get the resources for 50% off the usual £19.99 price.

 

Tax avoidance – supporting evidence for the Marxist Perspective on Crime

One of they key ideas of Marxist criminologists is that the Law is made by the property owning Capitalist class and  serves their interests.

(NB You might like to review the perspective by reading this long-form post on the Marxist theory of crime more generally before continuing…)

The issue of tax avoidance, which means legally bending the rules to avoid paying tax, is one of the best examples of how the legal system surrounding tax is structured in such a way that allows the wealthy to set up ‘shell companies’ in tax-havens to avoid paying tax on their income and investments….

Such methods can only ever benefit the rich as you need to be quite wealthy to be able to afford the legal and accountancy fees associated with doing this, so these methods are not really available to average, or even moderately high income individuals.

Lewis Hamilton Tax Avoidance.png

To my mind, the most notorious example of a tax avoider from 2017 was Lewis Hamilton, who used the ‘off shore’ method to get a £3 million VAT rebate on his £16 million private jet.

The Lewis Hamilton story was revealed as part of the ‘Paradise Papers’ leak – which consists of 13.4 million documents from offshore legal service providers such as Appleby covering seven decades, from 1950 to 2016. Tax-dodging is a very common practice by the wealthy!

Focussing on Corporate Tax Dodgers rather than individuals…

Corporate Tax Dodgers: the UK’s Worst Offenders – This article lists Google and Gary Barlow (or rather the Corporate entity ‘Take That’ as among the UK’s worst tax-dodgers, although it doesn’t distinguish between tax evasion (which is illegal) and tax avoidance (which isn’t)… I especially love the fact that it was put together (as basically an advert) by an accountancy firm in the North East of England – one of England’s poorest regions and thus the most likely to suffer from lower government revenue to tax dodging.

On a similar theme this Daily Mail article outlines with more clarity the Corporations avoiding Tax – including some very big names such as Café Nero and Vodafone, and LOTS more!

 

 

 

 

 

‘Station’ based lessons for A level sociology

Station based lessons are those in which the teacher sets up a number of different (and differentiated) tasks on different tables in the class room and students spend a set time at each table, moving from task to task.

I find these are most useful at the very beginning of the Winter and Easter terms, after students have done sufficient sociology to enable them to work through said tasks largely on their own, with the teacher acting only as a facilitator…

This is precisely what I’ll be doing with my Upper sixth groups when I face the horror and terror of going back to school on Thursday…. Station lessons make things a little easier…

Here’s one to try out, based on recapping consensus theories of crime and deviance, links to the resources are below.

Overview plan:

  • students spend about 30-40 minutes working through the 5 stations, 5-7 minutes on each of five separate stations.
  • students spend about 20-30 minutes ‘writing up’ the answers in the attached booklets.

Resources 

  • Consensus Theories of Crime Recap Lessons.
  • White board for task
  • A3 photocopies of pages 2-4 above for stations 2, 3, and 5.
  • Card sorts for task 4 (I don’t have these to hand, but you simply need cards with concepts, and pictures and perspectives – this is more of a general recap rather than a consensus theory of crime recap),

Station 1: White Board Station (AO1 – Knowledge)

  •  Explain your one of the consensus theories of crime in picture form – you may use three words also.

Station 2: AO1 Concepts Station (A01 – Knowledge)

  • Research and write in the definitions for two-three of the concepts
  • If you finish, add in an example or piece of supporting evidence which illustrates the concept

Station 3: Data Response Station (AO2 – Application)

  • Read the item, then for one theory write in how that theory would explain the case study in the item. 

Station 4: Card Game Station (AO3 – Analysis)

  • Game 1: Shuffle the concepts and theories cards – pick two (or three!) at random, suggest a link between them.
  • Game 2: Rank the ‘case studies cards’ – rank them in order of how well they support your assigned theory. 

Station 5: Evaluation Station (AO3 – Evaluation)

  • Add in as many evaluation points as possible for one theory
  • If you finish, then add in counter-evaluation to the previous evaluations of theories

Further comments

There’s not a lot else to say really… this was just a New Year’s post for all the sociology teachers out there, happy new year!

Good Sociology Movies #1: Minority Report

Thought I’d start bashing out the occasional Friday post on good sociology movies… starting with Minority Report – which is a great intro to the ‘surveillance and crime control‘ aspect of the AQA’s 7192 sociology syllabus, crime and deviance topic,

It’s the opening scene in Minority Report which is really the relevant bit here: the arrest of Howard Marks:

In the above scene, John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) is the chief of police of a special Washington D.C. ‘pre-crime’ unit – in which predictions are so accurate that people are arrested before they have committed a crime.

In the movie, predictions are actually made on the basis of some ‘psychic’ beings who are biogenically networked into the police’s systems, but this aside, the above movie acts as a great starting point for the topic of surveillance and pre-crime.

You can simply show the clip, and then get students to think about where in society authorities restrain or restrict people based on ‘big data’ which is a form of surveillance.

Students should be able to think of a few examples at least, tied into the topic of ‘actuarial crime control‘.

Maybe I’ll blog about the answers another time…

Is the Surge in Hate Crime just due to an Increase in Reporting?

Has there been an increase in hate crime since Brexit?

The Number of hate crimes reported to the police in England and Wales between 2012-13 and 2016-17 jumped by 90%, but is this because of an actual, underlying increase in hate crime incidents (or the seriousness of incidents that would warrant reporting), or is it just because people are now more likely to report ‘hate crimes’, maybe having interpreted something as a hate crime when, in fact, it wasn’t.

There is some evidence that suggests ‘misinterpreting’ or ‘over-reporting might be the case – court convictions in 2016 were lower than in 2010.

Possible increases for the increase in reporting are as follows:

  • The authorities actively encourage it
  • incidents can be registered anonymously
  • The victim or witness to a crime only has to interpret a crime as being racially motivated (for example) for it to be classed as a hate crime.
  • No evidence is needed to back up the reporting of the hate crime to get it recorded.

So it might just be, that there has not been an increase in hate crime at all, this could just be a complete social construction.

In fact, this ‘increase’ might be harmful – in that it suggests that we are more divided than we actually are!

Sources

The Week, 16 December 2017.

BBC Article 

 

The Criminals in the House of Lords

Lord Bassam, Labour’s soon to be chief whip in the House of Lords has just agreed to repay £41 000 in expenses. The peer claimed a remarkable £260 000 over seven years to cover the cost of his accommodation in London, despite the fact that during that time, he commuted daily to his accommodation in London, a trip for which he claimed an additional £41 000 in travel expenses.

Elite Crime.png

It might appear that logic would dictate that one of these must be a Fraudulent claim, a fraud committed against the UK taxpayer who pays these expenses, given that you can’t do both at the same time!

However, no sanctions or prosecutions were brought against Lord Bassam, because peers of Lord Bassam do not define his actions as a Fraud, just a ‘breach of the rules’.

Imagine if this had been someone in work claiming benefits – it’s pretty much the same thing! It’s a fraud against the UK taxpayer – the state would have taken action action against such a person.

This is a great illustration not only of how crime is socially constructed, but also yet more supporting evidence for the Marxist view of crime – in this case that ‘fraud’ is only ‘fraud’ when it’s being ‘committed’ by the poor.

 

 

 

 

 

Lord Bassam is far from the only only criminal peer: a recent study identified 16 ‘silent’ peers who had collectively claimed about £400 000 in expenses and daily allowances, over a year in which they had made no contribution whatsoever to debate.

 

https://www.parliament.uk/biographies/lords/lord-bassam-of-brighton/3504/register-of-interests

Is Violent Crime Increasing?

According to the latest police recorded crime figures there has been a significant increase in crime in the last year:

  • Gun crime has increased by 27%
  • Knife crime has increased by 26%
  • Robberies have increased by 25%
  • Stalking and Harassment have increased by 36%

At first site, what’s interesting about these figures is that they not only demonstrate a radical increase, but this abruptly reverses the recent trend in declining violent crime:

increase violent crime UK

However, these figures may not actually give us a reliable picture of the actual change in violent crime because of ONE simple fact: police forces in England and Wales are facing significant budget cuts, and so there may have been a more concerted effort on the part of the police to detect and record crimes over the last year – if crime can be shown to be going up, then this can be used as evidence to not cut police funding.

Then there’s the possibility that the public may be reporting more crimes – the ability to report online, for example, makes it easier to do so, and where harassment crimes are concerned, this may be due to a wave of recent campaigns such as the Everyday Sexism blog,  to raise awareness of the fact that such behaviour is not acceptable.

British Crime Survey, based on accounts by victims, shows that crime is still going down, and this is generally regarded as a much more valid way of measuring the extent of crime in England and Wales than police recorded crime, as the BCS removes the subjectivity-bias of the police in investigating and recording crimes:

police recorded compared british crime survey

Sources 

The Guardian