You might have seen the unfolding of the ‘Cyprus gang rape case‘ over recent months.
This seems to be a good example of how the courts in Cyprus engage in ‘victim blaming’ when it comes to rape, and seems to illustrate many of the ideas of radical feminism – about how patriarchal institutions punish women for the violence men do against them. It’s of obvious relevance to Feminist theory applied to Crime and Deviance.
The Cyprus Rape Case…
On 17th July 2019 a British woman filed a report in a police station in Ayia Napa claiming she had been gang raped by 12 Israeli men. The men were detained, and various examinations carried out, linking 7 of them to the alleged victim through DNA evidence and or shared scratches/ bruises. The incident was also filmed.
On 27th July the victim visited the police station again, to give a statement, but after 8 hours of questioning without a lawyer retracted her original report saying she had consented to having sex with all 12 men.
The alleged rapists were then released and allowed to go home to Israel while the British woman was charged by the Cypriot authorities with making a false statement – and had to spend the next 6 months on bail why she waited for her trial to take place.
On the fourth of January, the woman was found guilty of misleading the police, but the judge refused to take into account certain crucial pieces of evidence – he didn’t even look at the video footage which was taken, for example.
As punishment she received a four month sentence, and was allowed to return home to the UK, and she is now going to appeal her conviction.
If you want to find out more, from a Feminist perspective, then this Huffington Post article is a useful source.
IMO this is a grim case which clearly shows the lengths the police and the courts will go to in Cyprus to protect men by blaming women who get gang raped.
Why do women offend, reoffend and how do we break the cycle?
This recent Positive Thinking Podcast on radio 4 (30 December 2019) explores why women offend, reoffend and how to break the cycle.
It has obvious relevance to the Crime and Deviance module and this is also an excellent example of a Feminist inspired programme, with the focus on stories rather than stats and solutions rather than causes.
Women make up a tiny proportion of the overall prison population and are twice as likely as men to be given a short sentence (of two years or less). However, the reoffending rates for women given short sentences is around 70% compared to men’s which is 20%.
It’s suggested that short prison sentences hit women a lot harder than men, especially the 50% of them who have children. A short sentence is just enough to mess up their lives and break down their social and emotional support networks, but not enough time for them to receive the structured support/ therapy that might help them break out bad habits such as substance abuse, for example.
The programme is co-presented by an ex-offender, Whitney, who has had 10 convictions for offences such as drugs and carrying weapons, and has spent time in jail. The programme focuses a lot on her story about why she started and continued offending ( rather than focusing on statistics) but its real focus is on solutions.
Whitney’s case is presented as ‘typical’ and it’s pretty bleak (well worth a listen first five mins of the podcast) – she was abused as a four year old by someone known to the family, and taken into foster care at 7 years of age along with here siblings, then spent the next several years in various foster homes, making 47 run-away attempts during that period. She was also excluded from multiple schools.
Eventually the authorities let the siblings go back and live with their mother, it seems because of their belligerence, but rows happened between Whitney and her mother, and that’s where her criminal record started. However, it was getting caught carrying a knife that led to her first jail sentence – she never used or drew the knife, just carried it for self defence, and she didn’t actually get a jail sentence for carrying it – she got sent down for failing to stick to the restrictions but on her as part of her remand-sentence – interfering with her tag and staying out clubbing after curfew.
She describes going to jail for 2 months as something which ‘broke her’ – she says she saw women going and coming back during that time, saw and learnt things that maybe she never should have.
Probably the most interesting section is when Whitney asks ‘could I as a four year old stopped myself from being abused? Could I as a 7 year old stopped my siblings being taken into care?’
The answer – ‘Probably not’ reminds us that Whitney is actually a victim of abuse, and that’s the root cause of her offending behaviour, so maybe being tough on such people by giving them prison sentences is not the right answer, especially when the stats show that prison does very little to break the cycle of offending.
Solutions – breaking the cycle of offending
The show looks at three projects working on solutions – one of the most interesting is a hair dressing salon in Dagenham, Essex, in which one enterprising woman trains ex offenders and drug users in level one hair dressing.
Part of the reason this works is that hairdressing is very social, and so it gives the students a connection to ‘normal’ life – and the feeling that ‘other people’ are interested in them – one student referred to didn’t have that as all she’d ever known was abusive relationships.
This project is really about going back to the very basics and just giving women the building blocks to structure their lives, and it seems to work – out of more than 40 people who took the course, only 3 didn’t complete it – 1 died and 2 went back to their own ways.
The short answer is yes: ex gang members who join a religious ‘support’ programme as a way out of crime have lower re-offending rates. However, the re-offending rates of those who quit such programmes have higher reoffending rates than those who never took part at all!
The podcast starts off with a discussion of what gangs are, focusing mainly on how uncritically the term is used.
There’s an especially interesting discussion on labelling as applied to gangs and how naming a gang can sometimes be enough to bring it into existence.
There is also commentary on how the gang label is typically applied to groups of young people, and how it has racial connotations, being applied more to black youth.
The podcast then moves onto routes into gangs, outlining how various ‘causal factors’ have been identified through research, such as poverty, deprivation, and childhood trauma.
However research on causes is a bit 1990s, and the focus today is more on routes out of crime, or what criminologists call desistance
Desistance: Routes out of Crime
This episode of Thinking Allowed finishes off with a summary of Professor Ross Deuchar‘s work on the routes out of gangs.
He has spent time with gang members who have served their time for gang related offenses and in a liminal phase, trying to transition away from gang life, and his research has a real global focus, he’s researched desistance in Scotland, the US and Asia.
Previous research of his highlighted the fact that traditional, or hegemonic masculinity played a big part in gang members criminality – much of the violence was about playing out a hyper masculine role.
His research shows that religious groups offering therapeutic support to ex gang members have a higher success rate than usual in helping ex gang members to desist from crime.
He suggests this might be because the focus on spirituality (rather than dogma) allows for a deepening awareness of self an others and it helps ex-gang members learn how to be men in different ways to previously.
There is a lot more to this podcast, and I suggest you check it out, click the link above to find out more!
This teaching resource bundle contains everything teachers need to deliver 10-hour long lessons in the sociology of crime and deviance for A level sociology.
Each lesson includes a student work-pack, supplementary resources such as PowerPoints, a detailed lesson plan and numerous lesson activities including starters, plenaries and links to some Socrative quizzes.
There is also some material on exams or formal assessment,
but the main focus of these lessons is on content delivery rather than
revision. If you’re interested in more assessment resources please see my you
might like my various ‘revision bundles’, assessment details are contained
within the relevant documents in each of these.
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.
An overview of the ten introductory lessons:
An
introduction to Crime and Deviance
An
introduction to crime statistics
Applying
sociological perspectives to the London Riots
Consensus
theories of crime review lesson
The
Marxist perspective on crime lesson 1
The
Marxist perspective on crime lesson 2
Research
and letter- to MP writing lesson on corporate and white-collar crime
The
Right Realist perspective on crime lesson 1
The
Right Realist perspective on crime lesson 2
Researching
Right and Left Realist policy solutions to knife crime.
Resources in the bundle include:
Five student workbooks covering all of the above lessons
Eight Power Points covering most of the above lessons (not for riots or the corporate crime research lesson.
10 lesson plans covering all of the above lessons.
Various supplementary hand-outs for some of the above lessons as necessary.
Starters and plenaries for crime and deviance
Extensive gap-fill crime and deviance revision grids with answers.
Full crime and deviance scheme of work.
Fully modifiable resources
Every teacher likes to make resources their own by adding
some things in and cutting other things out – and you can do this with both the
work pack and the PowerPoints because I’m selling them in Word and PPT, rather
than as PDFs, so you can modify them!
NB – I have had to remove most the pictures I use
personally, for copyright reasons, but I’m sure you can find your own to fit
in. It’s obvious where I’ve taken them out!
189 police officers have been convicted across 12 police forces in England in Wales in five years since 2013 , according to a recent FOI request (source: The Telegraph). This equates to just 37.8 police officer convictions each year.
According to Full Fact, there were 126, 300 total police officers in England and Wales in March 2019.
This gives us a police officer conviction rate of 0.03% per year – that is to say that 0.03% of police officers are convicted of a crime each year.
1.38 million people in the general population were prosecuted in the year (CJS Stats, 2018)
A very rough estimate for the number of adults in England and Wales is around 50 million, so this gives us a rough adult conviction rate of 2.76 per year.
This means the Police officer conviction rate is 100 times less than that for the population as a whole.
How accurate are these statistics?
Personally I’m sceptical about the police officer conviction rate.
Despite the fact that the police probably are less likely to commit crime – I mean it kind of goes with the job, not committing crime, and then there’s the embarrassment of getting caught even if you are criminally inclined, which I imagine would be a further deterrent, I still think there’s a lot of criminal police officers whose crimes are just not getting detected.
I imagine you’d be less likely to be suspected of a crime – I mean the police themselves aren’t going to get stopped and searched are they?
Then there’s the fact that prosecutors might be more reluctant to prosecute police because it makes the system look flawed.
Then of course there’s all those things which won’t be defined as criminal because it’s the police doing them in the line of duty – such as speeding and violence, and drug possession come to think of it.
‘Any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.’ (Hate Crime, England and Wales, 2018-19).
There are five main characteristics which the police monitor…..
race or ethnicity
religion or beliefs
sexual orientation
disability
transgender identity.
However this is not an exhaustive list and hate crimes can also be committed on the basis of age or gender, and there are calls to include misogyny (hatred of women) as a hate crime.
Hate crimes typically include any of the following acts motivated by ‘hatred’ against any of the above characteristics….
Assault with or without injury
Harassment
Causing fear, alarm or distress
Criminal Damage
All of these crimes can also be committed in general, but if a victim feels they were motivated by hatred of their religion or gender identity etc. then the police must record the act as a hate crime.
Trends in Hate Crime
Trends in hate crime vary significantly depending on where you get your data…
Police recorded Hate Crime reports that there were 103,379 Hate Crimes in England and Wales in 2018/19, an increase of 50% over the last five years:
However, the 2018-19 Crime Survey for England and Wales shows a decline in Hate Crime the estimated number of hate crime incidents experienced by adults aged 16 has fell by 40 percent from 307,000 in the combined 2007/08 and 2008/09 surveys to 184,000 in the combined 2015/16, 2016/17 and 2017/18 surveys.
Thus it’s possibly best to reject the Police Recorded Crime Stats as being invalid as a measurement of the total amount of Hate Crime committed, given that around 50% of CSEW Hate Crimes are not picked up by the police.
Sociological Perspectives on Hate Crime
Many of the earlier perspectives seem pretty ineffective at explaining this type of crime. You’d probably have a hard time trying to apply Functionalism, for example: by definition these crimes are divisive, and a reflection of conflict in society, rather than social integration, and it’s hard to see how this particular type of crime could be regarded as functional for society or in any way positive.
Similarly with other consensus theories: there’s little evidence that a breakdown of social control, a strain in society, or of subcultures being significant causal factors (at least no more than with any other type of crime) of hate crime… many of these crimes are committed by lone individuals.
It’s possible to apply Interactionism to help understand religiously motivated crime motivated by Islamophobia, given the general negative press coverage of Islam, focussing mainly on infrequent terror attacks when they happen. However, this doesn’t explain hate-crimes agains other religions or minority groups. There’s hardly a moral panic against the LGBT community for example!
Rational Choice Theory (from Right Realism) could partially explain hate crime – possibly some of the perpetrators feel as if there’s little chance of them being caught harassing their victims because the ‘general public sentiment’ is on their side, so they won’t be reported.
This does seem to be a very postmodern crime – in that it’s a negative response to the increased visibility of minority groups and the increase in Diversity in British culture in recent years, although this is a very general level of theoretical explanation.
Possibly hate crime is a reaction to the increased relative deprivation and a feeling of marginalisation experienced by the perpetrators? Maybe they feel as if everything ‘diverse’ and ‘minority’ is being celebrated and has a place in British Culture but that more traditional British culture now has no place? So maybe there’s a possible application of Left Realism to be made here.
Conclusions>?
Hate Crime is a difficult crime to understand. It seems that many of the perspectives simply don’t apply to it, and those that do only seem to apply at the most general level.
So maybe this is a type of crime that defies sociological explanation?
NB – there may be quite a lot of it, but remember that if you take the CSEW stats, hate crime is actually going down, while the police seem to be getting better at reporting it, so whatever the causes, maybe it’s not all bad?!?
whether an act is criminal or not is determined by social processes. Crime is not a universal or objective phenomenon – it varies over time and across societies depending on the laws which are constructed by people.
The idea that crime is socially constructed is a key idea within the sociology of crime and deviance. This means that social processes determine whether an act is legal or not. The introduction of new Acts of Parliament continually change the laws which change the nature of crime.
There are many things which were not illegal in the past which are criminal and thus illegal now.
A brief timeline of some recent changes to the law illustrate this…
1973 – Motorcycle helmets made compulsory
Before 1973 it was perfectly legal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, not so from 1973.
Previous to this it was held that men could not rape women within marriage, because the marriage union was equivalent to consensual sex at any time. It was not until the 2003 Sexual Offences Act that rape within marriage became illegal.
1994 – informally organised Raves made illegal (sort of)
In 1994 The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 clamped down on anti-social behaviour. It effectively gave the police new powers to break up raves, or any informally arranged gathering of 100 or more people listening to music involving a series of repetitive beats.
The 1992 Castlemorton rave, the biggest ever informally organised rave in British history, is one of the events that led to the establishment of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Anti-Social Behaviour Act…
NB the act didn’t technically make it illegal for you and your mates to organise a rave, it just makes it easier for the police to break them up, slap an injunction order on you, and then arrest you the next time for breaking the injunction order.
This notorious act also made it easier for the police to break up road protests, move on travellers and arrest hunt saboteurs.
The 2007 ban made it illegal to smoke indoors in public places such as public transport and bars.
You used to be able to smoke in pubs, as the video below illustrates…
Besides being some seriously excellent music, there’s plenty of people smoking away in the background! Keep in mind that this was on mainstream TV in 1982 at Christmas, when smoking in public was perfectly usual!
I’d throughly taking a study break for 40 minutes and watching the whole thing, but if you’re ‘on a study vibe’ fast forward to around 4 minutes and the second song ‘London Girls’ – you can clearly see the cigarette smoke wafting behind Chas, or it might be Dave. (I love them, but I’m not sure which is which!)
NB ‘London Girls’ is also a lesson in gender norms at the time. Things have ‘progressed’ there a bit too you might say!
Acts restricting (or allowing) the use of psychoactive substances are useful examples in themselves to illustrate how ‘crime’ is socially constructed. While the UK has been toughening up its drug laws increasing numbers of states in America have been making the growing and sale of cannabis legal.
For more info on the history behind drug legalisations see this link –
2020 – parents to be banned from smacking children in Wales (probably )
Smacking your children isn’t illegal in England, at least as long as you don’t leave any physical signs of bruising on them, but there is currently an act going through the Welsh parliament that aims to ban the physical punishment of children by parents outright. It looks set to pass at some point in near future.
2020 – Coronavirus: The Lockdown Laws
There are currently (November 2020) three main lockdown laws which apply nationally in the UK:
Gathering restrictions – ‘the rule of six’ prevents people from gathering in groups of more than 6.
Face mask rules – people must wear a face covering on public transport and when going into shops.
Business restrictions – pubs and restaurants have restricted opening hours, night clubs must remain closed.
The Lockdown laws are one of the best illustrations of the social construction of crime – they came into effect suddenly in Spring 2020 and are still under constant review. More over there are also locally applied restrictions, so the laws vary from area to area!
So in 1972 you could have drunk a couple of pints in the pub while smoking (in the pub), organised an attended a quick Rave with your mates with all of you high on Spice (or whatever so called ‘legal highs’ existed in 1972), ridden back home on your bike without your helmet on (assuming you were within the drink driving limits) and then forced yourself on your wife without her explicit consent, and non of that would have been illegal, thus you would have committed no crime.
Act out the same scenario today and you’d be breaking multiple laws and looking at a lengthy jail term.
NB this post makes no judgement about the morality of any of the above acts or laws, it’s merely to highlight the extent to which crime is socially constructed.
Signposting
The context dependency of deviance is a useful concept to get students thinking about early on in the Crime and Deviance module.
What can prison population statistics tell us about Crime Control in the UK? Is Prison an effective strategy for controlling crime?
These are questions that should be of interest to any student studying the Crime and Deviance option within A-level sociology.
Scotland, England and Wales have high prison populations
In England and Wales we lock up 40% more people than in France and almost twice as many people as they do in Germany, which are broadly comparable countries.
Yet there is no link between the prison population and levels of crime
England and wales have seen a rising prison population and a rising then a rapidly falling crime rate
Finland has seen a declining prison population and a rising and then a gradually declining crime rate.
Canada has seen a broadly level prison population and yet a relatively stable crime rate.
Most people are serving short sentences for non-violent offences
Nearly 70% of the prison population are in for non-violent offences – which means that 30% are in for violent offences. In those prisons where the two populations are mixed, this must be awful for some of those non-violent offenders.
People are getting sentenced for longer
I’m not sure what’s underlying this rise in more serious offences …. the most obvious long-sentence crime of murder has decreased in recent years, so maybe this is for violent gang related and terrorist related crimes which involve in harm rather than death ? Something to research further!
Does Prison work?
In short, if controlling crime is what you hope to achieve, then no it doesn’t because nearly 50% of those sent to prison are recalled within 1 year of being released.
However, there are more reasons why you might want to lock people up other than just rehabilitating them and preventing future offending – there is an argument that they just deserve to be punished whether they reoffend or not.
How do community service orders and suspended sentences compare to prison?
it seems that both of these are more effective at preventing reoffending, but the difference isn’t that great:
63% of people who serve sentences of less than 12 months reoffend compared to
56% of those who receive community orders and compared to
54% of those who receive suspended sentences.
HOWEVER, this may be due to the fact that those avoiding jail have different circumstances and/ or different characters to those who do go to jail – they might just be the kinds of people less likely to reoffend already!
Conclusions
Overall these prison statistics suggest that while we like to lock people up in England and Wales, there is little evidence that doing so prevents crime.
Maybe we should be looking for cheaper and more effective solutions – such as early intervention (initially expensive but cheaper than several years in and out of jail), or public shaming for example?
People are more likely to return a lost wallet if it has cash in it than if its empty
In a recent field experiment researchers posing as members of the public dropped off 17000 lost wallets at reception desks of banks, hotels and museums in cities in 40 countries.
Some wallets contained no money and others £10 cash, and each had a shopping list, a key and business cards with contact details for the owner.
Only 40% of the empty wallets were returned compared to 51% of wallets with £10. The researchers also tried the experiment with £75 in which case the wallet was returned in 72% of cases.
There were significant cross-national variations: In China less than 20% of wallets were returned while in Switzerland the figure was 75%.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This is a great example of a field experiment and a cross national study combined, which seems to be designed to test levels honesty in different countries.
It’s mainly relevant to the Crime and Deviance module and seems (at face value) to be supporting evidence for the view that 60% of the reception staff in hotels around the world won’t go out of their way to return a wallet with no money it to its owner – but progressively more of them will if there is more money in the wallet – this seems to be suggesting reasonably high levels of empathy/ honesty – if 75% of people return a wallet with £75 in, that’s higher than I would have expected. (Then again perhaps I’m just dishonest scum?).
Limitations of the experiment
Despite the 40 countries, it’s not very representative of the populations within those countries – basically reception staff in hotels/ banks/ museums – that’s a very thin cross section of the class structure.
The experiment also tells us very little about the reasons why people didn’t return the wallets, and very little about why the return rates varied so widely.
The low return rates in China could be because the Chinese are inherently less honest, and the high return rates in Switzerland might be because the Swiss are inherently more honest.
However, it might just be showing variations in cultural norms and values.
In China, for example, the low return rates may be due to a collectivist culture resulting in everyone thinking a lost wallet is no big deal, as everyone’s going to be OK whatever happens to them, due to a collective safety net.
Also, people may not have bothered to return the wallets because very few people actually use cash in China (at least in the cities) – money transfers are done by phone, and people increasingly use their phones to access their properties. Thus, maybe the low levels of return there are because the wallets were seen as something of a ‘back up’ or an ‘eccentricity’?
In Switzerland on the other hand, maybe the high return rates signify the high levels of individualism?
As with many things sociological/ psychological, more research required to dig deeper!
A level sociology students should be looking to using contemporary examples and case studies to illustrate points and evaluate theories whenever possible. In the exams, the use of contemporary evidence is something examiners look for and reward.
Below are a few examples of some recent events in the news which are relevant to the sociology of crime and deviance. You’ll need to read the items for more depth on how to apply them.
