This chapter evaluates the idea of ‘social harm’, considering whether we should think of it as being separate from, or related to, what we have previously thought of as ‘criminology’. It begins by examining what social harm is, and the many criticisms that its proponents make of traditional interpretations of ‘crime’ and ‘criminology’. The social harm approach, a perspective that has become increasingly prominent over the past two decades, argues that state-generated, legal definitions of ‘crime’ are much too narrow, as they do not reflect significant (though not always illegal) social, physical, emotional, psychological, cultural, and financial and economic harms that can be inflicted by social structures, multinational bodies, and the state. So far, much of the work in this area has focused on broader theoretical and conceptual issues, but social harm perspectives have also informed important studies of a wide range of social occurrences and events. These have ranged from studies of the harm caused by corporations, human trafficking, genocide, austerity measures, intimate partner violence, and penal harm.
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19. Social harm
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19. Understanding state crime
Penny Green and Tony Ward
This chapter discusses the concept of state crime and proposes a distinction between ‘core state crimes’ of organized murder, rape, theft, etc., and more ambiguous criminal activity. Focusing mainly on core state crimes, it reviews some of the main approaches to explaining state violence and corruption. It then explores the methods used by social scientists to study state crime. While ethnographic fieldwork is the central method of research, it is complemented by a range of other sources of quantitative and qualitative data. These include, for example, the analysis of social media content and satellite imagery.