Victimless Crime
Definition
An offence built around conduct where no identifiable third party is harmed against their will, typically because the participants consent or the only person affected is the actor.
Related terms
- Decriminalisation
- The formal removal of conduct from the category of offence, here applied to the movement away from treating status conduct as court...
- Harm Principle
- The idea, associated with John Stuart Mill, that the only legitimate ground for the state to restrict a person's conduct through law...
- Moral Regulation
- The use of law to enforce a shared standard of conduct or virtue, independent of any measurable harm to a third party.
- Vagrancy Law
- Legislation that criminalises being without a fixed residence, visible means of support or, in some versions, the act of begging in public.
- Consensual Crime
- An offence built on an exchange between willing participants, such as commercial sex, where the label victimless is most contested.
- Legal Moralism
- The position, associated with Patrick Devlin, that the state may criminalise conduct simply because a society's shared moral code condemns it, even...
- Nordic Model
- A sex-work regulation approach, first enacted in Sweden, that criminalises the buyer of sex while decriminalising the seller.
- Public Order Offence
- An offence framed around visible conduct in public space, such as begging or soliciting, rather than around harm to a specific person.
Explained in these topics
- Victimless Crime: Alcoholism, Drugs, Begging, Sex Work, Suicide (Unit I)
- Victimless Crime and the Limits of Moral RegulationAn offence where the conduct is consensual or self-directed and no unwilling third party suffers a direct, provable harm.