Social Construction of Crime
Definition
The view that what counts as criminal is not fixed by nature but produced through social, political and historical processes, so the same act can be legal in one era or place and criminal in another.
Related terms
- Criminalisation
- The formal process by which a legislature converts a previously lawful or merely deviant act into a criminal offence, typically by enacting...
- Legalistic Definition of Crime
- Sutherland's definition: crime is behaviour prohibited by the state as injurious to the state, punishable by law. It ties the concept of...
- Mala in Se
- An act treated as inherently wrong in itself, such as murder or rape, independent of whether a statute names it. The wrongness...
- Mala Prohibita
- An act that is wrong only because a statute prohibits it, such as jaywalking or unlicensed fishing. Remove the statute and the...
- Moral Panic
- A period of intense, media-driven public anxiety about a group or behaviour perceived as an exceptional threat to social order. Coined by...
- Consensus vs Conflict View of Law
- Two theoretical accounts of who defines crime: consensus sees law as codifying shared values, conflict sees it as reflecting the interests of...
- Normative Definition of Crime
- The social or sociological view that treats crime as one instance of the wider category of deviance, conduct that violates a group's...
Explained in these topics
- Crime, Deviance and the Limits of Criminalisation
- Crime vs Deviance: Legal and Social Definitions (Unit I)The idea that what counts as crime is not fixed by the nature of the act itself but by a political and legislative process that can change over time.