Definitions
Crime = refers to activities that break the law of a particular country – legal activities
Deviance = behaviour that is different from the normal expectations of a society and which is usually viewed as wrong or bad
All crime is deviance but not all deviance is illegal
Social Order is the state of social ability and social solidarity that characteristics most modern societies
general conformity to the shared norms and values, so that society is peaceful and predictable. Sociologists do not always agree about how and why social order is achieved, and in whose interests it works.
It derives from the fact that citizens generally agree on and therefore share similar values, morals and norms so consequently are reasonably well integrated into society = sense of belonging
It is maintained by agencies of social control
Social control – the processes by which people are persuaded to obey the rules and conform. The agencies of social control are institutions that serve to ensure conformity.
Sociologists also disagree about whether social control is a good or bad thing, and whether it operates in a fair way.
Social control can be formal or informal
Formal social control = refers to the law
carried out by the government, the armed forces and the Criminal Justice System
Function of formal agencies of social control such as the police, courts and prisons is to control, suppress and punish illegal or criminal behaviour.
Formal social controls can also comprise organisational rules or regulations.
Informal social controls = aimed at enforcing the sorts of behaviour that society expects of particular individuals.
carried out by agencies such as the education system, the family, the peer group, the media and religion.
We may be less aware of informal social control, but it is arguably more important and more effective than formal social control.
Peer groups are also informal agencies of social control — for example, friends expect a certain standard of behaviour from one another and failure to live up to that standard may result in a person being excluded from a friendship network
The relativity of crime and deviance
Sociologists believe that ‘normality’ and ‘deviance’ are relative concepts because there is no universal or fixed agreement on how to define them.
The fact that crime and deviance are socially constructed means that what is deviant or criminal largely depends on its situational context.
This means that it is only deviant in certain times, in certain places or in particular cultures.
This relativity of crime and deviance can be illustrated in a number of ways.
Definitions of crime and deviance are often relative to historical period.
For example, homosexuality was a criminal offence until 1967, as was blasphemy until 2008. In 2017 there is still a significant minority of the population that views homosexuality as deviant and abnormal/unnatural and consequently views it with disapproval.
Definitions of deviance may also be relative to culture.
Muslim culture takes blasphemy more seriously than Christian culture.
For example, since 1987, in Pakistan over 60 people have been murdered before their trials after being accused of blasphemy.
Muslim culture also views drinking alcohol, consuming pork products and gambling as highly deviant.
Definitions of normality and deviance may be relative to gender; for example, Saudi Arabia is a deeply conservative society in which it is deviant and illegal for women to be in public without their head being covered or for women to drive a car.
However, men are subject to social controls too; for example, some shopping malls actively discourage single men from entering at certain times or on specific days.
Definitions of deviance may also be relative to locality or context; for example, nudity is fine in private (in the bedroom and bathroom) but is generally regarded as deviant in most public spaces apart from beaches set apart for the purpose of nude sunbathing.
What is ‘normal’ behaviour for one social group might be ‘deviant’ behaviour for another.
The notion of relativity can be illustrated in a number of ways.
- First, what counts as deviance depends on the social context in which the activity is carried out. For example, nudity is fine in some circumstances is tolerated and regarded as humorous at sporting events (streaking), but is seen as a symptom of mental illness or criminality if persistently carried out in public (i.e. indecent exposure).
- Second, what counts as crime and deviance changes according to historical period, for example homosexuality and attempted suicide were crimes in the UK only 50 years ago.
- Third, definitions of crime and deviance depend on the cultural or subcultural context
For example, drinking alcohol is illegal in Saudi Arabia and disapproved of by Muslims in the UK.
What is ‘normal’ behaviour for a teenager in a particular youth subculture in the UK might be seen as ‘deviant’ by adult society.
Due to the cultural diversity of contemporary societies such as the UK, views on what constitutes deviance may often vary within societies.
For example, what may seem deviant to the wider population may not be deviant within some subcultures
The social construction of crime and deviance
Crime and deviance are the product of cultural expectations and social processes rather than, say, inherent badness or evil.
This is because societies make laws or have social expectations in order to control behaviours, but these do not remain fixed over time and often differ across societies and within them.
However, many young people may interpret the law as old-fashioned and consequently ignore it.
There is also evidence that different police forces enforce this law with discretion.
Some take it very seriously; others turn a blind eye to it.
Crime and deviance are both ‘socially constructed’, that is, they are created and defined by society.
Crime and deviance can also be said to be ‘relative’: they will vary according to time, society and circumstance.
The same behaviour or actions may be deviant or criminal in some cases but not in others.
Many sociologists agree that crime and deviance are socially constructed.
This means that what counts as ‘normal’ or ‘deviant’ behaviour is not straightforward or universally agreed.
Crime and deviance might appear to be ‘real’ but these concepts are actually the product of social interaction.
For example, people interact with one another and construct laws which differentiate between what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in particular situations and cultures.
However, people or groups with power are able to impose their rules or laws on less powerful groups.
Laws therefore construct certain types of unacceptable behaviour as criminal – as serious enough to deserve punishment.
Deviance is behaviour that deviates from that defined as civilised behaviour by the majority of those who make up society.
It is behaviour that challenges the consensus.
Social Control
Social control is the process of persuading, encouraging and enforcing conformity to cultural values and norms.
Most societies monitor the everyday behaviour of their members to make sure they conform to the consensus as to what constitutes normal behaviour.
This conformity ensures social order.
That is, citizens consent to abide by the rules, laws and punishments set out by the social institutions that make up their society.
Such consent and conformity ensures that social behaviour is ordered, that it is predictable and not undermined by chaos, anarchy and conflict.
Social control and therefore conformity and social order are enforced by formal and informal agents of social control.
Formal social control: Formal agencies of social control include the police, the courts and prisons, and mainly function to make sure that citizens conform to the law.
Other social institutions such as schools and workplaces also have formal written rules which pupils and employees are expected to abide by.
Informal social control: Informal agents of control also function to make sure people conform to rules which are essential to the smooth running of society or social institutions.
For example, teachers ensure pupils behave during lessons and in the playground; parents ensure children are courteous and polite, while line managers ensure workers do their jobs properly.
The mass media and religions are also informal agents of social control, because newspapers, magazines, television and religious texts often make clear their disapproval of particular types of behaviour.
Failure to abide by rules can result in negative sanctions or punishments which can be formal, for example, in some societies this might mean the death penalty.
In the UK formal sanctions imposed by the criminal justice system include imprisonment and fines.
Employers can formally suspend or sack workers, while schools can suspend or exclude pupils. Informal sanctions are mainly used by parents; for example, a child might be ‘grounded’ or sent to the ‘naughty’ step.
Peer groups also use informal sanctions such as bullying, humiliation and rejection to enforce conformity.
People who conform may be rewarded with positive sanctions; for example, children may be praised by parents or teachers, while workers may be rewarded with promotion or a pay rise.
Measuring crime
Crime and deviance is measured in three ways in the UK.
The main way is that the government collects the Official Crime Statistics (OCS) which are made up of crimes reported to the police by victims and the general public and recorded by the police, as well as crimes detected or cleared up by the police.
The OCS are supplemented with:
- statistics from an annual victim survey carried out by the government known as the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW)
- self-reports – this is a type of questionnaire which lists a number of petty criminal acts and asks respondents to tick those they have successfully committed (that is, without being caught).
Anonymity and confidentiality are usually guaranteed.
The official crime statistics
The official crime statistics (OCS), which are published every 6 months by the government, are made up of two types of data:
1 The police record crimes reported by victims, the general public and their own officers.
- An annual survey — the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) — of 40,000 people collects data about their experience of crime as victims during the previous year.
Supporters of this survey suggest that it is more ‘valid’ than the police statistics because it includes crimes which have not been reported to the police or not recorded by them for various reasons.
Some positivist sociologists find the police-recorded crime figures useful in identifying trends and patterns in criminal activity, especially with regard to:
- the volume of crime
- types of crime committed
- the social characteristics of criminals
- the effectiveness of laws and anti-crime policies
However, interpretivist sociologists question the reliability and validity of the OCS.
They suggest that police-recorded statistics in particular are a social construction.
They are a product of society rather than objective facts.
This is because they only show crimes that are reported to and recorded by the police.
In this sense, the OCS may not reflect the reality of crime.
Rather they may tell us more about the groups involved in their collection — victims, the general public and the police — than they tell us about crimes and criminals.
This can be illustrated in a number of ways:
- Interpretivists point out that the OCS do not account for all the crime committed in the UK.
- They account only for those crimes that are recognised as such by victims and by the police.
- Sociologists have long argued that there exists a dark figure of unrecorded crime.
Some institutions, for example banks or private schools, may not report crimes because of the bad publicity that may be generated for their institutions.
Fee-paying schools may expel or suspend students for criminal activity such as vandalism and drugs, rather than involve the police.
Victims of crime may not report crime to the police for several reasons:
- They may regard the crime as too trivial.
- The perpetrator may be someone they love (for example, wives may not report their husbands for domestic violence).
- They may regard the crime as too embarrassing (for example, victims of sexual crime may be reluctant to come forward for this reason).
- They may be too frightened because they fear reprisals.
- They may not know or realise that a crime has been committed against them (for example, elderly victims of fraud or children who are victims of abuse) or they may mistrust the police.
- In contrast, people are more likely to report crime if they can see the benefit (for example, a police report may be necessary to put in an insurance claim) or if they believe the police are likely to catch the offender.
Strengths
They cover the whole population and go back over many years so can be used to establish trends and patterns in criminal activity with regard to its volume, e.g. how much there is and whether crime rates are rising or falling, and types of crime – whether it is violence against people or whether it is property orientated.
They are collected in a scientific fashion, in that all police forces have to follow standardised counting rules laid down by the government which are used to class offences in the same way wherever they are committed.
They give criminologists insight into what type of people, with certain personal characteristics, are more likely to be criminal.
For example, the statistics suggest that as people get older, they commit less crime; people from deprived backgrounds are more likely to be in prison than those from wealthy backgrounds and males appear in greater numbers in the OCS than females.
They are up to date.
They are easy to access and have already been compiled.
Unlike other methods of investigating crime they do not suffer from ethical problems.
Limitations
They do not include unreported crime.
Some groups may be reluctant to report crimes against them to the police.
For example, young males may be too embarrassed to report violence against them, whereas rape victims may fear that the police, media or society may partly see them as ‘at fault’ for what happened to them.
Some victims such as children or the elderly may not realise they are victims, for example, of abuse or fraud.
Institutional victims of crime such as banks may be reluctant to report employees for white-collar crimes because they fear that the negative publicity will cost them the confidence of their customers and loss of business.
They do not include unrecorded crime.
Police forces are given a lot of discretion in how to police by central government but this can distort the crime statistics.
For example, some police forces choose to treat soft drug use lightly and not arrest or charge people for using cannabis, while other police forces treat all drug offences equally.
The government can distort the OCS by inventing ‘new’ crimes
Interpretivist sociologists argue that crime statistics are socially constructed and consequently, they may tell us more about the behaviour of those employed by the criminal justice system, such as the institutional racism of the police, than they tell us about crime and criminals.
Political pressure on the police to meet crime reduction targets may result in the police artificially massaging the OCS using ‘coughing’, ‘cuffing’ or ‘skewing’ techniques.
Crime statistics can be distorted by historical crimes, for example, Dr Harold Shipman committed over 200 murders over a 40-year period but these were only uncovered in 2001. These were all were added to the 2002 murder statistics which gave a false impression of trends in murder in the period 2001–03.
The OCS do not include information about the employment status or social class of offenders.
The counting rules used by the police sometimes change, as they did in 2002, which makes it difficult to compare historical periods because we are not comparing like with like.
Police recorded crime figures
These statistics include all police recorded crime in England and Wales.
Separate figures are published for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
They are supplied by the 43 territorial police forces of England and Wales, plus the British Transport Police, via the Home Office to the Office for National Statistics.
They are sometimes used as a definitive measure of the amount of crime which has taken place, but only include crime which the police become aware of and which the police then record.
Strengths of using the police recorded crime statistics include:
- They are easy to access and have already been compiled;
- They are up-to-date and standardised – the time lag between occurrence of crime and reporting results tends to be short, providing an indication of emerging trends;
- They cover the whole population and go back many years, so trends and patterns can be identified;
- The ethical problems of studying criminal behaviour in other ways are not an issue;
- They provides ‘whole counts’, rather than estimates that are subject to sampling variation – the whole country is included.
However, there are many limitations of the police recorded crime statistics:
- They do not include undetected or unreported crimes – many victims may not report crimes to the police, or the crime may go undiscovered.
- They do not include unrecorded crime – the police have a certain amount of discretion over whether to record a crime which has been reported, and how to record it
Collectively these unrecorded offences are known as ‘The Dark Figure of Crime’ – we will consider this further below.
- They do not provide a complete picture about each crime – some information is not collected, for example the employment status or family background of the offender.
- Accuracy may vary between areas, for example if one area has a particular focus or target to meet.
- Changes in public perception may influence them.
For example, a certain crime may be noticed and reported more if it has recently been publicised
- Definitions, laws and police counting rules change – so they are not strictly comparable over time.
- Changes in police practice and government policy may influence them, as policies about dealing with certain offences may change.
- Pressure on the police to meet crime reduction targets may lead to some crimes ‘disappearing’ from the figures, or being downgraded.
The impact of police discretion is considered below.
In recent years, the police figures have been distorted by police investigations into historical sexual abuse, that is, offences that have been committed by high-status individuals such as Jimmy Savile decades ago.
If a celebrity is found guilty of hundreds of these past offences, they go into the police figures in the year that the guilt is established.
This gives the impression that such offences are increasing but in reality this is a statistical illusion.
Some crimes, for example drug use and prostitution, have no clear victims (they are referred to as victimless crimes) and are therefore dependent on police detection.
However, there is no national consistency in the policing of these offences.
It was estimated in 2014 that the police fail to record one in five crimes reported to them.
It is argued that they exercise this discretion in recording crime because of the political pressures on them to improve their clear-up rates and to improve their efficiency.
These pressures may result in police forces either reclassifying particular crimes as ‘less serious’ or regarding them as too trivial to record.
The actual process of policing on the streets may be problematic for the police-recorded figures for three broad reasons.
First, the police may exhibit conscious or unconscious bias with regard to the social status of those who report crime.
For example, they may not take victims from particular social backgrounds seriously, as exemplified by Owen Gill’s study of a working-class community living in Luke Street in Liverpool which suggested that poorer victims of crime were treated more negatively by the police.
Black communities have also long complained that the police do not take racist crimes against them seriously.
Second, there is evidence that the police stereotype particular social groups — young people, black people, working-class people and people living in particular neighbourhoods — as more ‘suspicious’ and potentially more criminal, which makes them more likely to stop, search and arrest members of these groups.
This suggests that certain groups appear more frequently in the statistics because the police pay them more attention.
In contrast, the police are less likely to label middle-class people, women and older people as potentially criminal.
They are not paid the same attention and consequently do not turn up in the police statistics very often.
Third, police discretion also influences the recorded figures in that if a person or group is stopped, their chances of becoming a police statistic may depend on how the officer interprets their appearance, attitude and manner.
Anderson et al. (1994) found that officers were more likely to arrest youth who they interpreted as disrespectful.
The police-recorded figures are dependent on how the government decides to count crimes and what they decide should be law.
For example, the counting rules for crime were extensively changed in 2001–02 especially with regard to violent crime, which, unsurprisingly, increased thereafter.
Moreover, between 1997 and 2010 the Labour government introduced 3000 new laws (and therefore new crimes).
Any rise or fall in the levels of crime may simply reflect changes in the law as much as actual changes in crime.
The way the police count crime is based on rules set out by the Home Office.
These have changed on a number of occasions, making it difficult to compare like with like over time.
Interpretivist sociologists conclude that all these pressures and influences on the reporting and recording of crime mean that the statistics do not help us in terms of working out how much crime there really is.
This can be illustrated by the fact that for every 100 crimes committed, it is estimated that only 47 are reported to the police, even fewer, 27, are recorded by the police, and only 5 are cleared up in the form of a caution or conviction
Victim surveys
A second way of estimating the extent and patterns of crime is by using victimisation (or victim) surveys.
This is an alternative way of measuring crime which involves surveying people about which crimes they have been victims of in a given period.
Victim surveys are likely to include some crimes which have not been reported to the police.
A major contribution made by victim surveys to the measurement of crime is the doubt they cast on the accuracy of police recorded crime figures.
The biggest example of a victim survey is the Crime Survey for England & Wales (CSEW) which is included as part of the official crime statistics by the Government
In these, a sample of the population, either locally or nationally, is asked which offences have been committed against them over a certain period of time.
In March 2013, the CSEW involved approximately 35,000 people aged 16 plus and 4,000 children aged 10–15 who were interviewed face to face by trained researchers using a standardised questionnaire about their experiences as victims of crime during the previous year.
The statistics from this victim survey are compared with the Official Crime Statistics to work out levels of under-reporting and consequently the ‘true’ level of crime in the UK.
The interviews are carried out by trained interviewers who use laptop computers to record the responses.
The aims and objectives of the survey are explained to all those who take part and anonymity and confidentiality are guaranteed.
Strengths
Victim surveys crucially include the dark figure of crime, those crimes that do not get reported to, or recorded by, the police.
For example, in the past, the CSEW survey has discovered that as many as four in ten crimes were not reported to the police for various reasons.
They cover new and emerging crimes, especially new types of fraud and online crime.
They are useful for identifying those social groups most at risk of being a victim of crime and have been used to design crime prevention programmes.
They are useful as a means of documenting people’s experiences of anti-social behaviour and how this has affected their quality of life.
They are also measure people’s attitudes to policing and the criminal justice system.
The way that the CSEW data is collected is thought to be highly reliable because it is unaffected by changes in the way the police record crime.
The methodology of the CSEW has remained much the same since the survey began in 1981 – therefore it is the best guide to long-term trends.
Weakness
The CSEW relies on victims having objective knowledge of the crimes committed against them. However, people’s memories with regard to traumatic events are often unreliable – there is a danger of subjective exaggeration as well as the telescoping of incidents, i.e. people unconsciously move them forward and backward in time.
Marxists point out that the general public may be unaware that they may have been victims of crimes committed by the economically powerful, e.g. corporate crime, green or environmental crime, state crime.
Watts, Bessant and Hil argue that the victims identified in crime surveys are the victims ‘that the state officially chooses to “see” or recognise’.
They exclude victimless crimes (e.g. crimes such as possession of drugs and use of prostitution).
Questions have been asked about people’s drug use but asking people to self-report their own crimes is not thought to be reliable.
Realist sociologists such as Young and Lea argue that the CSEW surveys tell us very little about the day-to-day experience of living in high crime areas such as inner cities or problem council estates.
For example, living in these areas may mean that residents have a well-above the national average chance of being victims of both property and violent crime or being repeat victims of crime.
Pilkington argues that the CSEW distorts the meaning of the statistics.
For example, the BCS/CSEW suggests that violent and sexual offences are few in number. Pilkington claims that crime statistics relating to violence and sexual crime cannot be compared with crime statistics relating to property crime.
He points out that although violent and sexual crimes have fallen in number, they have a more traumatic effect on their victims as symbolised by the fact that offenders found guilty of such offences generally receive longer prison sentences.
40 per cent of those in prison are serving lengthy sentences for violence or sexual crime.
Ellington argues that the samples used by the CSEW are not representative of the national population because owner-occupiers and 16- to 24-year-olds are generally over-represented, while the unemployed, the homeless and those who live in inner-city areas with high crime rates are under-represented
The Crime Survey for England and wales (CSEW)
The best known victimisation study is the government’s Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), the results of which are now published as part of the OCS.
The CSEW is one of the largest social surveys conducted in Britain.
It is currently carried out by the British Market Research Bureau on behalf of the Home Office, and mainly involves face-to-face structured interviews. It has been carried out since 1982, though it was called the British Crime Survey (BCS) until April 2012.
Initially it was biennial, but since 2001 it has been carried out annually.
Only those over 18 were originally included, and then those over 16, but since 2009, children aged 10–15 are also included, usually as part of their parents’ survey.
The CSEW has a nationally representative sample of around 35,000 adults and 3,000 children per year.
The response rates for the survey in 2013–14 were 75 per cent and 68 per cent respectively, which is relatively high.
The survey is weighted to adjust for possible non-response bias and to ensure the sample reflects the profile of the general population.
Respondents are interviewed in their own homes by trained interviewers using a structured questionnaire that is administered on a laptop computer.
Respondents are asked about property crimes (such as burglary) and personal crimes (such as theft from the person or violence) which they themselves have experienced.
The reference period to which these questions relate is from the first of January in the calendar year preceding the survey, up to the date of interview.
The CSEW tends to show that crime is much higher than the police figures suggest, for some crimes up to 4 times higher.
In order to classify incidents, the survey collects extensive information about the victims of crime, the circumstances in which incidents occur and the behaviour of offenders in committing crimes.
The CSEW has been successful at developing special measures to estimate the extent of domestic violence, stalking and sexual victimization, which are probably the least-reported to the police but among the most serious of crimes in their impact on victims.
The survey also includes questions on people’s attitudes about crime-related topics such as anti-social behaviour and the effectiveness of the police
Hoyle observes that these surveys offer a more accurate picture of victimisation than police records supply, and identify the social, economic and demographic characteristics of victims.
In the UK, the CSEW has produced a number of interesting findings about the distribution of victims among social groups and the relationship between victims and offenders.
The CSEW has consistently found that young males, especially the unemployed and low-waged, have a particularly high chance of being victims of violence, although most of this involves little or no injury.
The older a person gets, the less likely they are to be a victim of crime.
Ethnic minorities also report more victimisation than white people.
The CSEW has also reported that women are less likely to be victims of crime than men but worry more about crime.
Finally, the CSEW data show that there is more crime than is reported to the police (although this gap is narrowing) but a lot of it is fairly trivial in nature.
Realist sociologists such as Lea and Young have been critical of the government’s application of victim surveys because the CSEW does not provide detailed information about particular places, and is largely quantitative rather than qualitative.
In addition to the CSEW, sociologists have carried out some other victim surveys.
In 1983, Left Realists Lea and Young carried out the first Islington Crime Survey (ICS)
Kinsey carried out the first Merseyside Crime Survey (MCS).
These surveys focussed on specific geographical areas and explored the impact of crime on the individual respondents’ lives.
Both these crime surveys pointed out that while the average chances of being a victim are small, particular groups face high risks. It is not the rich who are the usual targets of muggers or thieves, but the poor, the deprived, ethnic minorities and inner-city residents.
Moreover, these groups are not victimised every now and then.
Rather they are frequently victimised by criminals because they cannot afford to design crime out of their lives.
The ICS suggested that a third of households had been touched by crimes such as mugging and that people living in deprived inner-city areas regarded crime as a major social problem which made them feel afraid and unsafe when they went out after dark.
Both the ICS and MCS data also suggest that female fear of crime is justified and women often under-report crime of a sexual nature or that which occurs in the privacy of the home.
Limitations of CSEW
For example, the CSEW survey excludes certain types of crime such as crimes against businesses and fraud.
Homeless people tend to be excluded from most victim survey samples.
Such surveys often rely too heavily on the memory of victims despite the fact that the trauma of crime may mean that memories are faulty and biased.
Moreover, if a person is unaware that they are a victim of crime, they cannot report it.
Finally, despite victim surveys being anonymous, people also tend to under-report being victims of sexual offences
Though many commentators and politicians claim that the CSEW is a more accurate measure of crime in England and Wales than the police recorded statistics, it does have its limitations, including:
- Victimless crimes, or crimes where the ‘victim’ is a large corporation, such as fare evasion or shoplifting, will not appear;
- Only people over 16 have been asked in the past so crimes with child victims were not picked up, though this has now changed;
- The CSEW only surveys a sample, so overall trends are an estimate which may not be representative (especially for rare crimes);
- The response rate is around 75 per cent, missing potentially important data (see below for more on this issue).
However, most of these problems will be constant over time, and it is carried out every year, so trends may be identified.
Hough and Mayhew (1985) who carried out the first British Crime Surveys commented that, ‘the value of crime surveys should be assessed not against the yardstick of perfection, but against the existing alternatives: survey and police statistics combined enable the contours of crime to be mapped far better than police statistics alone.
A self-report is a type of questionnaire which, when used in the sociological study of crime, lists a number of petty criminal acts and asks respondents to tick those they have successfully committed without being caught.
Anonymity and confidentiality are usually guaranteed.
Studies based on self-reports, for example Belson on adolescent boys in London and Campbell on teenage girls, indicate that the majority of respondents admit to some kind of illegal activity, which confirms the dark figure of unreported and unrecorded crime.
Self-reports indicate that females and middle-class males are just as likely to commit crime.
In particular, they have challenged the idea that females commit significantly less crime than males.
Campbell found that the ratio of male crime to female crime is 1.5:1 rather than the 7:1 portrayed in the OCS.
These self-reports therefore challenge the picture of the typical criminal as male and working class.
The 2003 Offending, Crime and Justice survey, which used self-reports, found that 40% of whites admitted offences compared with just 28% of blacks and 21% of Asians.
In contrast, a self-report survey conducted by Sharp and Budd (2005) found that people from mixed-race backgrounds were most likely to admit soft drug use, while 6% of whites admitted using heroin and cocaine compared with only 2% of black people and 1% of Asians.
However, Marsh observes that the self-report method may be unreliable because, despite guarantees of confidentiality and anonymity, some respondents may still not admit committing criminal offences.
Research by Junger-Tas (1989) suggests that boys who have had more contact with the criminal justice system were less likely to cooperate with such surveys.
Self-report data may not be representative because self-reports tend to focus on asking questions about committing petty offences rather than serious crimes.
Moreover, the samples of young people used in self-report studies are often unrepresentative in the sense that such questionnaires are often distributed in schools and colleges and may miss school dropouts and truants.
The validity of the data generated by self-reports may be undermined by under-reporting. People may under-report because self-report studies are retrospective and depend on respondents being able to remember what crimes they have committed in the previous 12 months.
However, validity may be undermined by over-reporting too.
Boys may exaggerate or over-report their offences to create an impression of ‘being tough’ or alternatively conceal their crimes because they fear the police might be informed.
Attempts that have been made to check the ‘honesty’ of respondents have indicated that about a quarter of respondents are liable to conceal wrongdoings.
Other victim surveys
The Islington Crime Survey (Jones, Maclean and Young, 1986) was first conducted by the Centre for Criminology in inner city London.
A second survey was carried out in 1990, and a similar survey was carried out in Merseyside (Kinsey, 1984).
These surveys not only focused more on specific geographical areas than the CSEW, but also focused on the impact of crime on individual’s lives and particularly on vulnerable groups.
The first Islington survey showed that a third of all households had been touched by serious crime in the last twelve months, and crime was rated as a major problem, second only to unemployment.
Because there was a qualitative nature to the questions, the survey was also able to uncover the degree to which crime shaped people’s lives.
For example, a quarter of all people always avoided going out after dark, specifically because of fear of crime, and 28 per cent felt unsafe in their own homes.
More than half of women stated that fear of crime meant that they did not often or ever go out after dark.
Young argues that the Islington survey shows that fear of crime is real and rational, pointing out that it is understandable that 46 per cent of people admitted to worrying ‘a lot’ about mugging, given that over 40 per cent of the population actually knew someone who had been mugged in the previous twelve months.
Police recorded figures suggest that males are more likely to be victims of crime than females, but women’s fear of crime is not just caused by a moral panic according to Young (1988).
He claimed that by the use of carefully trained researchers who were able to sympathetically conduct interviews, the Islington Survey found a considerably higher rate of female victimisation, due to the non-reporting of sexual and domestic offences through official channels
Victims have also been studied even more qualitatively, for example Dobash and Dobash’s research into domestic violence (1979) which involved in-depth interviews with women at a refuge.
Such qualitative research is not aiming to compete with police recorded figures, but rather to access a particular group of victims and to understand the impact of crime on their lives.
Lea and Young carried out the Islington Crime Survey (ICS) in 1986, which asked victims living in inner-city London about serious crime such as sexual assault, domestic violence and racial attacks in a more in-depth way.
This survey found that a third of households in poorer neighbourhoods had been affected by serious crime and women, in particular, had realistic fears about being the victims of sexual crime.
Other realist crime surveys suggest that the poor are often the subjects of repeat victimisation. This is because: they cannot afford to invest in securing their property; crime disproportionately affects the poor as they often do not have insurance; and they feel that the police are unsympathetic to their plight.
Realist victim surveys therefore conclude that poverty is the main variable which makes a person more at risk of being a victim of crime in the UK.
However, all types of victim surveys can be criticised for being partial, selective and potentially biased.
General limitations of victim surveys
Most victim surveys will be subject to similar limitations to the CSEW and do not have the benefit of such representativeness.
However, those which take a more qualitative and less official approach may gain enhanced validity.
Young (1988) presented a comprehensive evaluation of victim surveys, despite having been prominently involved in the Islington Crime Survey himself.
He argues that a ‘dark figure’ is also present in victim surveys, for various reasons.
The accuracy of victim surveys relies on the memory and honesty of the victim.
Some people may get the timescale wrong and people may not tell the truth for various reasons, including shame or guilt.
Additionally, people’s threshold of ‘crime’ may differ.
For example, some may be unaware they have been a victim of a crime, whilst others may include things which are not technically crimes, such as trespass.
Another problem relates to response rates. If the response rate is low, this affects the representativeness of the final sample and the generalisability of the results.
Those who do not respond may disproportionately include victims of particular offences such as sexual offences, people who are hostile to official surveys and people from particular social groups.
Additionally, non-victims may not respond, not seeing the survey as relevant to them, which could result in an overestimation of crime.
This is the term used for all unrecorded crime.
It is hard to estimate how large this figure is, because it includes crimes which are not even known about.
It is unlikely to be in proportion to the police recorded crime statistics, so we cannot just estimate, for example, 50 per cent more crime on top of the known figures.
In addition, some types of crime are more likely to be in the dark figure than others.
Police discretion
One problem with police recorded crime figures is that they will be affected by the discretion and decisions made by the police.
Some individual police officers may be corrupt or have their own reasons for misrecording individual crimes.
However, recent evidence suggests that practices which compromise the accuracy of the statistics are widespread
The police could also be influenced by the stereotype of the ‘typical criminal’, leading to more stop and searches and more arrests for some types of people, creating misleading figures.
This issue can be linked to concerns about institutional racism and chivalry
What do the sociologists think of the police recorded crime statistics?
The police recorded statistics give us a picture of the ‘typical criminal’.
While it is clear that there are flaws in the statistics, which even the police themselves acknowledged, some theories broadly accept the police statistics as accurate social facts, and go on to explain why people with the typical criminal’s characteristics commit crime
Functionalists believe in the existence of social facts and measuring social behaviour scientifically.
They would trust quantitative data produced in the statistics and see it as reliable and representative.
- Functionalists also believe there is a value consensus in society, so would see the police as representing all of us, and not question their motives.
Thus most functionalist and subcultural explanations use the ‘typical criminal’ presented in police recorded figures as their starting point in explaining crime, focusing on young, working class males in particular.
- Similarly, the New Right and right realists accept the official picture of the typical criminal presented by the police recorded figures, since they too believe that laws are made for the benefit of society and applied equally, and that the police are representing the interests of the whole society.
They focus on explaining criminality amongst the most deprived sections of society, referred to as the ‘underclass’, since statistics suggest that most crime is committed by such people.
- Left realists recognise the police figures are not perfect, but they should not be dismissed, because they are about real crimes.
They suggest police recorded figures should be supplemented by other methods, such as victim surveys.
- Some feminists accept the official picture that females commit significantly less crime than males, and try to explain why.
They look at the high levels of social control applied to females, for example
On the other hand, several sociological theories have a problem with police statistics, for various reasons, and challenge the idea of the ‘typical criminal’:
- Marxists see the police recorded crime figures as a tool used to control the working class and justify their control and oppression.
Police statistics are used to scare us and justify more policing.
- Interactionists agree to an extent with Marxists.
They focus on the social construction of crime statistics, paying particular attention to police labelling and the consequences of interactions between certain powerless groups in society and the police and the courts.
- Radical criminologists combine aspects of Marxism and interactionism in their approach to understanding crime, thus they tend to focus on the power of the police to label for political reasons.
Such ideas have also been used to challenge the over-representation of certain ethnic minority groups in the police recorded figures
- Some sociologists, including feminists, focus on the way that female offenders are treated differently by the police and in the courts.
Feminists also argue that, if anything, male crime against women is underrepresentedin the police figures.
So they do not challenge the idea of the typical criminal being male, but do challenge the accuracy of the statistics.
So there are both strengths and limitations of the police recorded crime figures.
The two main alternative approaches to the measurement of crime are victim surveys and self-report studies
Self-Reports
There are obvious logistical and ethical problems in carrying out self-report studies on large-scale samples of adults.
They are often carried out on young people and tend to focus on certain types of crime and deviance, often quite minor, rather than gaining a comprehensive picture.
However, this does not necessarily mean they lack value, since it is often these minor offences which are not picked up, in either the police recorded crime figures or the CSEW.
Self-report studies may be qualitative.
For example, TheJack-roller (Shaw, 1966) involved a series of unstructured interviews to build-up a ‘life history’ of a criminal.
Rather than measuring crime, this method gives an insight into criminality, so is favoured more by interpretivist sociologists.
However, most self-report studies are quantitative and usually involve a list of offences requiring the respondent to tick the ones they have committed.
Their findings often provide a challenge to the picture of the ‘typical criminal’ which is presented by the police recorded crime statistics.
For example, in her self-report study, conducted on young females and some young males, Campbell (1981) found that levels of crime and deviance admitted to by females and males were much closer than the police recorded figures tend to suggest.
Similarly, some self-report studies suggest that statistics overemphasise working class male involvement in crime
Self-report studies are often longitudinal in nature.
This means they follow the same group of participants over a number of years to get an overview of their criminality.
These usually measure several different variables, such as family background, peers, education, area, gender and ethnicity.
A well known example of a longitudinal self-report study is the Cambridge study, carried out by Farrington et al over a number of years, which has generated much data (for example Farrington 1989, 2000a, 2001).
The Cambridge Study followed the criminal careers of 411 South London boys, from the age of 8 to 32, and first started in 1961.
Another, more recent, example is the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, a longitudinal self-report study of the offending careers of over 4000 young people.
The Edinburgh Study focuses on gender differences, whereas the Cambridge Study was confined to males.
The cohort consists of all the young people in the City of Edinburgh in the relevant age group and information is collected from multiple sources about all members of the cohort once a year. At each sweep, the period covered is the previous 12 months, so that the study provides a continuous account of events in the lives of the cohort, and not just an account of selected time segments
A self-report is essentially a standardised list of minor criminal offences that is usually given to large samples of young people who are asked to tick the ones they have committed.
In order to increase validity, the sample is assured that their responses will be treated both confidentially and anonymously.
Strengths
They challenge the validity of the Official Crime Statistics and especially the picture of the typical criminal as male and working class.
Studies based on self-reports, e.g. Belson on adolescent boys in London and Campbell on teenage girls, indicate that the majority of respondents admit to some kind of illegal activity which confirms the dark figure of hidden unreported and unrecorded crime.
Campbell’s self-report study challenged the idea that females commit significantly less crime than males.
They can be longitudinal and follow the same group of people over the course of several years, therefore allowing the sociologist to examine the impact of particular variables such as family, class and poverty on criminality.
Weakness
Validity
People may under-report because self-report studies are retrospective and depend on respondents being able to remember what crimes they have committed in the previous 12 months.
Boys may exaggerate or over-report their offences to create an impression of ‘being tough’ or alternatively conceal their crimes because they fear the police might be informed
People are especially unlikely to co-operate with questionnaires that ask them to admit to sensitive and loaded issues such as domestic violence or racist attacks
Attempts that have been made to check the ‘honesty’ of respondents have indicated that about a quarter of respondenets are liable to conceal wrong-doings
Longitudinal self-report studies may suffer from attrition or high drop-out rates which may result in unrepresentative samples.
The representativeness of self-report questionnaires has also been questioned because it is impossible to include all criminal acts in a questionnaire.
Self-reports are limited in their representation of crime because they mainly focus on petty offences.
They are not representative of the main types of crimes that are dealt with by the courts.
Self-reports tend to be aimed at young people who are relatively easy to recruit to take part in this type of survey.
Ethics
Marsh notes that the self- report method may be unreliable because, despite guarantees of confidentiality and anonymity, some respondents may still not admit committing criminal offences, especially those who have had regular negative contact with the police or school authorities.
It is regarded as unethical to ask people whether they have committed more serious crimes because some sociologists argue that so-called ‘guilty knowledge’ should be reported to the police.
Issues affecting the usefulness of self-report studies
- Validity – Because of the subject matter, there are obvious concerns about the truthfulness and accuracy of the data gained.
Participants may conceal offending or make false claims about what they have done. The validity of self-reports is usually assessed by comparing them against recorded arrests or convictions which, as we have seen, contain their own flaws.
However, by comparing what participants say they have done with official records, their honesty can be evaluated to an extent.
For example, West and Farrington (1977) found that, at age 18, 94 per cent of convicted boys admitted that they had been convicted, whilst only 2 per cent of unconvicted boys claimed to have been convicted.
Farrington (2001) found some evidence that while young males may readily admit their convictions, this may not be true for older males or for females.
He suggests that this may be because older people and females are concerned to present a façade of respectability whereas young males, who offend more often, are more truthful
Self-reports can also be compared with more direct measures of offending.
For example, Farrington et al (1980) gave young people an opportunity to steal and compared actual stealing with self-reported stealing.
- Attrition – This refers to participation and drop-out rates in studies.
This is an important issue because participants who are most difficult to find and interview tend to commit the most offences according to evidence from Farrington et al (1990).
This suggests that a survey with a high attrition rate is likely to miss out a number of frequent offenders and to under-estimate the true number of offences committed.
One issue identified in the Cambridge Study was co-operation.
The most elusive and unco-operative men at age 32 tended to have had unco-operative parents at age 8 and were unco-operative themselves at age 18.
However, in the Edinburgh study, the participation rate after four ‘sweeps’ continued to be extremely high, at 94.4 per cent of the final cohort.
- Ethics – Ethical issues are clearly important to consider in any research into criminality. With self-report studies, key issues to consider relate to informed consent, confidentially and the right to withdraw.
For example, the Edinburgh Study gained the informed consent of parents, through a letter from the researchers.
Parents who wished to withdraw their children from the study were invited to return a tear-off slip.
Children were fully informed about the purpose of the study and are free to refuse at any time. Children were also required to sign a consent form allowing access to their police files.
Other limitations of self-report studies include the problem of matching the offender’s definitions of criminal behaviour with police categories.
Additionally, self-report studies usually focus on relatively small groups of people, and on particular types of crime, so do not give us an overall picture, reducing representativeness.