Crime and deviance key terms

Crime, deviance and the rules of social life

Crime is an illegal act punishable by law. Deviance is behaviour that breaks a group’s or society’s norms and values. These categories overlap, but they are not identical. Theft breaks criminal law and is generally condemned. Pushing into a queue usually breaks an unwritten rule rather than criminal law. An act can also break the law while gaining approval within a particular group.

Norms are expectations about behaviour; values are beliefs about what matters. Through socialisation, people learn both. Values such as respect for others can support norms against stealing. Following these expectations is conformity. Shared values, or value consensus, can contribute to social cohesion and social order, although agreement is not necessarily complete.

Deviance is socially defined: its meaning depends on the group, place and time. Swimwear may be accepted on a beach but considered inappropriate in a classroom. This makes deviance a social construct, not simply an inherent quality of an act. Changing attitudes can alter what people regard as acceptable, while legislation can change what counts as criminal. Neither public disapproval nor a newspaper headline by itself makes an act a crime.

Anti-social behaviour concerns behaviour that causes harassment, alarm or distress. It can overlap with crime and deviance, but not every example is a criminal offence. Delinquency describes young people’s crime and deviance, usually relatively minor behaviour; youth crime concerns unlawful behaviour by young people.

How society encourages conformity

Social control means the processes that encourage people to follow rules. Its agents include families, schools, peers, the police and courts. They use sanctions: rewards for approved behaviour and penalties for disapproved behaviour.

Informal control operates through everyday relationships. Praise, ridicule, disapproval and the threat of losing friends can all influence conduct. Formal control operates through laws and official agencies. A criminal conviction and court sentence are examples. Surveillance, such as CCTV, makes behaviour visible and can help prevent crime.

The criminal justice system includes the police, courts, prisons and probation services. These have different responsibilities: investigating suspected offences, deciding cases, imposing sentences, holding people in custody and supervising offenders returning to the community. A police caution is a formal warning for a minor offence, such as graffiti. The person must admit the offence and agree to be cautioned. A caution is not a criminal conviction.

Community service is court-imposed unpaid work in the community. Probation involves supervision in the community rather than simply imprisonment. Prisons punish and restrict liberty, but they also aim to rehabilitate offenders and deter future crime.

The legislature makes legislation, whereas the judiciary, including judges and magistrates, applies the law. Parliament is the UK legislature. In the legislative process, a proposed law is a Bill. It is considered by the House of Commons and House of Lords, including committee scrutiny, before receiving Royal Assent and becoming an Act of Parliament.

In England and Wales, all criminal cases start in a magistrates’ court. These courts have no jury: cases are heard by two or three magistrates, or a district judge. Less serious, non-indictable offences, such as minor criminal damage, are dealt with there. The most serious, indictable offences, such as murder, are passed to the Crown Court. Some offences can be tried in either court. In a Crown Court jury trial, the jury decides guilt and the judge sentences those convicted.

A right of appeal provides a route, subject to legal procedures, to challenge a verdict. A miscarriage of justice, such as the wrongful conviction of the Birmingham Six, shows why the outcome of a legal process cannot automatically be treated as proof that the process was fair or correct.

Different perspectives ask different questions

A theoretical perspective is a framework for explaining society. Functionalists examine social order, shared values and the functions of society’s institutions. Marxists emphasise class inequality, ownership and exploitation. Feminists examine gender inequality and male domination. Interactionists focus on meanings, interactions and how people define situations.

These perspectives direct attention towards different aspects of crime. Is offending connected to blocked opportunities? Whose interests do laws protect? How are women controlled? Why does one person receive a criminal label while another does not? Comparing explanations means considering both what each reveals and what it leaves unexplained.

Alienation, associated with Marxism, means workers’ estrangement from their work because they lack control over the work they do and the products they make. This is different from anomie, which concerns the breakdown of the norms that usually regulate behaviour. War or riots can disrupt established rules. Both concepts concern people’s relationship with society, but they identify different problems: lack of control over work versus weakened social regulation.

Anomie, opportunity and status frustration

Robert Merton’s functionalist explanation connects deviance to society’s goals and the opportunities available to achieve them. In his account of American society, material success was widely valued, but access to accepted routes, such as education and secure employment, was unequal. When success matters more than following accepted rules, those rules can lose authority: anomie develops.

Conformity means pursuing accepted goals through accepted means. Some people instead use criminal means to obtain the same desired success. Merton’s explanation therefore links individual behaviour to social structure rather than treating offending simply as a personal defect.

However, shared goals cannot just be assumed. People facing similar disadvantages do not all offend, and focusing on blocked opportunities among poorer groups can underestimate white collar crime. White collar crime is committed by people in relatively high-status positions during their work: an accountant making fraudulent expense claims is an example. Corporate crime is committed by employees on behalf of their company, such as illegally making and selling unsafe products. The distinction concerns the occupational setting and whose behalf the offence serves.

Poverty may restrict life chances and contribute to crimes such as theft or shoplifting, but it is not proof that a person will become criminal.

Albert Cohen’s Delinquent Boys (1955) offers a related explanation of status frustration. He argued that working-class boys could want mainstream success but face educational failure and poor employment prospects. Unable to gain recognition through accepted routes, some joined a criminal subculture.

Within that subculture, behaviour condemned by wider society could bring prestige. Stealing, vandalism or truancy could become ways to gain approval from peers. The important connection is between frustrated recognition and an alternative system of rewards—not merely between poverty and theft.

Cohen’s explanation can help account for group-based delinquency. A criticism is that working-class young people do not necessarily share mainstream success goals in the first place. Resentment towards teachers or successful students may reflect rejection of their values rather than failure to achieve them. Neither Merton nor Cohen explains every form of offending.

Labelling and the development of a deviant identity

Howard Becker’s interactionist account in Outsiders (1963) asks how behaviour comes to be defined as deviant. Whether a label is applied depends on who acts, who observes, where and when the act occurs, and how those involved respond. Agents of social control have particular power to make labels stick.

A criminal label may become a master status: the main characteristic through which others see a person. Other identities, such as employee, friend or parent, are pushed into the background. Stereotypes can then encourage assumptions that the person is untrustworthy or likely to offend again. This creates social stigma and may lead to exclusion.

If the person begins to understand themselves through the label, a self-fulfilling prophecy can develop. Rejection from conventional groups may encourage greater involvement with a deviant group whose values justify offending. Becker described this progression as a deviant career.

This is a possible process, not an inevitable sequence. Labelling theory explains reactions and continued deviance particularly well, but it does not fully explain why the original act occurred. Its contribution is to show that social control can sometimes reinforce the behaviour it aims to discourage.

Gender: offending, control and criminal justice treatment

Gender and criminality includes differences in offending, opportunities, socialisation and responses by the authorities. Official statistics suggest that women are less likely than men to offend and reoffend. Gender roles are socially learned expectations; they should not be treated as proof that all women or all men behave alike.

The chivalry thesis proposes that predominantly male criminal justice personnel may treat women more leniently because stereotyped ideas present women as needing protection rather than punishment. This treatment may particularly favour women who conform to gender expectations. If women’s offences are less likely to lead to formal action, official records may make the difference between women’s and men’s offending appear greater than it really is.

This is a claim about treatment, not a complete explanation of offending. A contrasting argument is that women can be treated more harshly for breaking both the law and expectations of acceptable female behaviour. A convincing assessment needs comparisons between similar cases, considering offence seriousness and previous offending, rather than simply comparing total numbers of men and women convicted.

Frances Heidensohn’s Women and Crime (1985) uses control theory to explain why women commit fewer crimes. She argued that male-dominated societies control women at home, in public and at work. Domestic responsibilities and financial dependence can restrict opportunities. Daughters may face tighter restrictions than sons on leaving home. Fear of male sexual violence and damage to reputation can constrain behaviour in public. Male-dominated workplaces and sexual harassment can provide further controls.

This explanation connects gender roles to everyday restrictions rather than assuming an inborn difference in morality. However, Heidensohn has been criticised for generalising across women’s different experiences and for not always providing strong research evidence for her claims.

Pat Carlen’s Women, Crime and Poverty (1988) examined 39 mostly working-class women aged between 15 and 46 who had criminal convictions. She used in-depth, unstructured interviews. Her explanation focuses on the rewards that encourage conformity. A class deal promises access to consumer goods through paid work. A gender deal promises material and emotional rewards from a male breadwinner in return for domestic labour and love.

Carlen argued that when these rewards are unavailable or illusory, crime can become a viable alternative. Her study gives detailed accounts of women’s experiences, but its small, selected sample cannot represent all women. Taken together, these explanations suggest that both social controls and justice-system responses matter; no single explanation should be assumed to account for every gender difference.

Media coverage, folk devils and moral panics

The mass media select which events to report. News values are media professionals’ judgements about what is newsworthy and deserves prominence. Agenda setting concerns the media’s power to focus public attention and steer debate. Repeated coverage can keep an issue in the public eye: attention to hoodie-wearing youths in the early 2010s is an example.

A media stereotype presents a group through an overgeneralised image. During a moral panic, a group or behaviour is portrayed as a major threat and the reaction is disproportionate. The targeted group becomes a folk devil and may be used as a scapegoat for wider problems.

Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) examined reactions to the mods and rockers. His case study included clashes at Clacton during the 1964 bank holiday period. He argued that newspapers exaggerated the numbers involved, the violence and the damage, helping to portray these youth subcultures as threats to law and order.

Media amplification means exaggerating an issue’s significance through coverage. Deviancy amplification goes further: reactions help produce more deviance. Cohen argued that publicity, public hostility and harsher policing could contribute to further confrontations and arrests, reinforcing the original threatening image.

A serious social problem is not automatically a moral panic. To justify that interpretation, examine the relationship between the coverage, the underlying events and the scale of the response. Reporting can raise awareness of genuine harm. Equally, more arrests may reflect intensified policing rather than a matching increase in underlying offending. Media influence therefore needs investigation, not assumption.

The popular press means tabloids or ‘red tops’, such as The Sun and Daily Mirror. The quality press covers a more serious range of issues, including world news, economics and business. These labels describe types of newspapers; researchers still need to examine their actual coverage. Propaganda promotes a particular view or cause, often using biased or false information. Pluralism, by contrast, recognises multiple views with no single group or argument dominating.

Measuring crime: records, victims and offenders

Crime research must distinguish reported crime, which has been reported to the police, from recorded crime, which the police enter into crime records. Neither includes every offence. The dark figure of crime consists of offences missing from recorded statistics because they are unreported or unrecorded.

Official crime statistics provide quantitative information that can reveal trends. Police-recorded figures are collected by the Home Office and published by the Office for National Statistics. A crime rate relates incidents of a particular crime to a specified number of adults during a stated period, such as robberies per 1,000 adults in a year. This makes comparisons more useful than raw totals alone.

However, recording rules, reporting behaviour and policing practices can affect the figures. The introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard in England and Wales in April 2002 increased the number of crimes recorded. A rise caused by improved recording is not evidence of an equivalent rise in actual offending.

A victim survey asks people about offences they have experienced, including unreported incidents. A self-report study asks people about their own offending. The distinction is whose experience is being investigated: victimisation or perpetration.

Suppose a person’s phone is stolen but they do not contact the police. A victim survey could capture that experience, while a police-recorded total would not include it unless it came to police attention and was recorded. A self-report study could instead ask whether a respondent had stolen a phone. These methods reveal different parts of the picture rather than producing interchangeable counts.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) is a large-scale victim survey run by the Office for National Statistics. It uses structured interviews to ask people about crimes experienced during the previous 12 months and whether they reported them to the police. Its findings help uncover unreported crime and identify trends, providing evidence for crime-reduction policies.

However, the CSEW does not measure every offence. It cannot interview someone murdered, and its household interviews do not provide a complete account of crimes against businesses or offences without a direct victim, such as drug possession. People outside its household sampling coverage, such as those who are homeless or living in prisons, are not represented in the same way. Respondents may also forget incidents or be unwilling to disclose sensitive experiences. Self-completion questions allow respondents to answer sensitive questions privately, helping them feel more comfortable disclosing information.

The Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) was a national longitudinal self-report offending survey in England and Wales, commissioned by the Home Office and conducted annually from 2003 to 2006. It investigated offending, drug use and anti-social behaviour, helping researchers examine the onset of offending and identify groups at risk.

Self-report studies can reveal offending that never reached the police or courts. However, respondents may forget offences or conceal them because they fear consequences. The OCJS also excluded people in settings such as prisons and care homes and those who were homeless. These exclusions matter because their experiences of offending may differ from those of household respondents.

Neither survey simply removes the dark figure of crime. Each extends knowledge beyond police records while retaining limits in coverage and disclosure. Comparing sources is therefore more useful than assuming one gives a complete count.

Choosing methods and judging evidence

Research involves collecting and analysing data. Primary data are collected first-hand by the researcher; secondary data already exist, having been collected by others. A researcher conducting interviews generates primary data, while one reusing published crime statistics works with secondary data. A hypothesis is a clear prediction that research can test.

A questionnaire with closed questions can produce comparable quantitative data. Open questions and unstructured interviews can provide qualitative accounts of motives and experiences. Carlen’s interviews illustrate why detailed accounts may reveal things that a count of convictions cannot. An attitude survey could instead investigate views about crime or confidence in the police: opinions are not themselves a measure of offending. A focus group explores a topic through group discussion, including how participants respond to one another.

Observation examines behaviour directly. Participant observers join activities; non-participant observers do not. In covert observation, participants do not know they are being studied. Participation and concealment are separate choices. Research into a group’s everyday culture can form an ethnography, while a case study investigates one setting, group or event intensively. Neither automatically represents the wider population.

Content analysis can investigate media portrayals. For example, a researcher could define categories such as references to violence, threatening descriptions and mentions of young people. They would code each article using those categories, then count occurrences and compare coverage across newspapers. Applying the same coding rules consistently supports reliability. Choosing only dramatic articles would introduce bias and weaken conclusions about coverage as a whole.

Reliability concerns consistency: repeating research using the same method should produce similar findings. Validity concerns whether it accurately measures what it intends to study. A questionnaire may repeatedly produce similar answers while still missing offending that respondents conceal. Research can therefore be reliable without being valid.

Sampling, mixed methods and change over time

A sample is a subgroup selected for research. A representative sample reflects relevant characteristics of the wider population; an unrepresentative sample does not. Studying only one school year, for example, would not represent all pupils in a school. A census instead seeks information about the whole population.

A sampling frame is a complete list of the population, such as a school register. Random sampling gives each listed member an equal chance of selection. Systematic sampling selects every nth member—for example, every twelfth name. If a list leaves some people out, those people cannot be selected from it.

Quota sampling recruits set numbers from categories in proportion to their presence in the population. Snowball sampling begins with a contact who introduces the researcher to other potential participants. This can help reach hidden groups, including people involved in crime, but the contacts may come from similar social networks. Sample size alone therefore does not establish representativeness.

Mixed methods research uses different methods to obtain a range of evidence, potentially both qualitative and quantitative. Triangulation cross-checks qualitative findings against quantitative data: interview accounts of experiences of crime could be compared with numerical survey findings. The methods may reveal both meanings and patterns, although agreement does not guarantee that every limitation has disappeared.

Longitudinal research follows the same people over time. It can reveal continuity and change rather than just describing one moment. The OCJS provides a crime-related example. A trend is the general direction in which data change over time, but its interpretation still depends on how the information was collected.

Ethics, inequality and careful conclusions

Crime research can expose people to legal, social or emotional harm. Informed consent means participants receive an explanation of the study and what taking part involves before agreeing. Confidentiality means keeping their information within the research team. Data protection provides legal safeguards for personal information, particularly identifying data, and includes participants’ rights to see information held about them. Researchers must also protect participants from harm and respect their right to withdraw. Covert research raises particular problems because participants do not know they are being studied and cannot give informed consent to it.

Ethnicity, gender and social class can affect experiences of crime and social control, but group membership is not proof of offending. Ethnicity concerns shared cultural traditions and norms; ethnic diversity means that several ethnic groups are present. Discrimination is unfair treatment, while racism involves prejudices about ethnic superiority or inferiority. Institutional racism occurs when an organisation fails people because of ethnicity, culture or skin colour, even if its members do not recognise that they are discriminating. These concepts require examination of processes and evidence rather than stereotyping whole communities.

Labels also need careful handling. Describing a benefit recipient as a ‘welfare scrounger’ portrays them as undeserving; it does not prove benefit fraud. Likewise, a media image of a group is not evidence that all its members behave alike.

A sound sociological conclusion connects the concept, the mechanism and the evidence. It also recognises alternatives: a statistical difference may reflect offending, reporting, recording, treatment—or a combination. The aim is not to replace one everyday stereotype with another, but to explain how behaviour and social reactions are shaped.

Core distinctions

• Crime: illegal and punishable by law. Deviance: breaks norms and values; depends on context.
• Formal control: laws and official agencies. Informal control: everyday approval, disapproval and relationships.
• Alienation: workers’ estrangement through lack of control over work and its products. Anomie: breakdown of social norms.
• Legislature: makes laws. Judiciary: applies them.
• White collar crime: high-status occupational offending. Corporate crime: offending on behalf of a company.

Explanations to connect

• Merton: shared success goals + unequal legitimate opportunities; anomie can develop when success outweighs rules. Criticisms: assumed consensus, unexplained conformity and insufficient attention to powerful offenders.
• Albert Cohen, 1955: blocked mainstream status → status frustration → alternative rewards in a criminal subculture. Criticism: youths may reject mainstream goals rather than share them.
• Becker, 1963: labelling → possible master status, exclusion and self-fulfilling prophecy → deviant career. Not inevitable; initial offending remains incompletely explained.

Gender

• Chivalry thesis: lenient treatment, especially for women conforming to gender stereotypes, may affect official records. Contrast: women may face harsher treatment for breaking law and gender expectations.
• Heidensohn, 1985: controls at home, in public and at work restrict women. Criticism: generalisations and uneven evidence.
• Carlen, 1988: class and gender deals reward conformity; failed rewards can make crime viable. Interviews with 39 convicted women: depth, but limited representativeness.

Media

• News values: selection and prominence. Agenda setting: public attention and debate.
• Stanley Cohen, 1972: mods and rockers; Clacton clashes in 1964.
• Exaggeration can create folk devils and fuel moral panic.
• Media amplification: exaggerated significance. Deviancy amplification: reactions encourage further deviance.

Crime evidence

• Reported crime ≠ recorded crime ≠ all crime; missing offences form the dark figure.
• Crime rates specify offence incidents, population basis and period.
• Recording changes can affect trends: the 2002 National Crime Recording Standard increased recorded totals.
• CSEW: victim survey; includes unreported experiences. Limits: recall, disclosure and coverage.
• OCJS, 2003–2006: longitudinal self-report survey of offending. Limits: concealment, recall and excluded groups.

Research judgement

• Reliability: consistency. Validity: measuring the intended reality. Representativeness: reflecting the population.
• Random: equal selection chances. Systematic: every nth member. Quota: proportional categories. Snowball: participant introductions.
• Content analysis: categories → coding → counting.
• Mixed methods: different methods. Triangulation: cross-check qualitative findings against quantitative data.
• Protect informed consent, confidentiality, personal data, withdrawal and participants’ welfare.