S: Sex Crimes to State Crime

Core idea

The first half of the "S" cluster is a long argument about what holds society together and what gets called criminal when it doesn't. Sex crimes and sexism open the topic with the unfinished feminist project of taking gendered victimisation seriously. Social control and social control perspectives then flip the standard criminological question — instead of asking why offenders break the rules, the control theorist asks why the rest of us keep them. Social exclusion, social harm, and socialisation widen the conceptual aperture: the harms that disorganise people's lives are not all illegal, and the institutions that prevent us all from offending depend on stable family, education, and community ties that exclusion erodes. The state and state crime close the loop by turning criminology on its own anchor: if the state defines crime, who polices the state when it commits crimes — and what does criminology look like when it stops taking the state as its starting point?

These eight concepts cluster because each one tugs at the same thread: the assumption that crime is what the state says it is, committed by people who are not us, and managed by institutions that are basically benign.

Why it matters

Mental model

Sex crimes

Sexual offences sit at an unusual intersection: they are among the most serious crimes by social consensus and among the least visible in official statistics — around 0.8% of recorded UK crime, but with significant under-reporting documented in victimisation surveys. The legal landscape has shifted dramatically in living memory. Rape within marriage only became a criminal offence in 1994; homosexual acts were decriminalised in 1967 and the age of consent for same-sex acts not equalised until 2001. Each shift reflects a wider cultural rethinking of consent, privacy, and the state's right to regulate sexuality.

Feminist criminology made three durable contributions: it forced the system to take seriously assaults committed by partners and family members (the majority of cases) rather than treating only stranger-rape as paradigmatic; it surfaced the role of victim-blaming stereotypes in deterring reporting; and it documented the gap between the law on the books and its uneven enforcement. Child sexual abuse follows the same arc — public attention on "stranger danger" and online grooming, when most abuse occurs in homes and institutional settings (schools, churches, care).

Sexism

Sexism in the criminology of crime mirrors sexism in criminology as a discipline. The criminal-justice system has historically applied unequal standards — leniency toward male offenders in domestic cases, suspicion toward female victims, harsher moral judgement of female offenders who deviate from gender norms. The discipline has compounded this by ignoring or distorting women's experiences both as offenders and victims. Feminist criminologists from Carol Smart onward have made gender central to crime analysis rather than a "women's issues" appendix.

Social control

Social control is the umbrella term for every mechanism that produces conformity to norms — from informal socialisation and peer pressure to formal policing, surveillance, and punishment. Foucault's influence reframed the question from "what institutions enforce rules?" to "how do modern societies organise dispersed networks of surveillance, discipline, and treatment that penetrate everyday life?" Cohen and Garland extended Foucault to map the contemporary saturation of state control across both public and private spheres.

Social control perspectives

Control theory (as a criminological paradigm) makes a specific theoretical move. Standard theories ask: what makes the offender different? Control theorists ask: what makes the rest of us conform? The premise — borrowed from Hobbes and Durkheim — is that humans are naturally self-interested, infinitely desiring, and would offend whenever profitable absent restraint. Conformity is the puzzle, not deviance.

Albert Reiss (1951) tied conformity to personal "ego strength". F. Ivan Nye (1958) distinguished four control mechanisms: direct (formal sanctions), indirect (informal relationship ties), internal (conscience), and opportunity control. Walter Reckless (1961) layered internal insulators (positive self-image, goal-orientation, moral beliefs, frustration tolerance) with external ones (consistent parental values, positive role models, clear behavioural limits, community belonging).

The most influential synthesis is Travis Hirschi's social bond theory (1969). Four bonds together produce conformity:

• Attachment — emotional ties to others (especially parents) that make their disapproval matter.
• Commitment — investment in conventional goals (educational achievement, career) that crime would jeopardise.
• Involvement — time spent in conventional activities that leaves less available for delinquency.
• Beliefs — internal identification with society's rules.

Hirschi found attachment the single strongest predictor. Critics noted that the theory was built on samples of low-level juvenile offending — it struggles with adult crime, female offending (an all-male sample), and white-collar crime (offenders with strong attachments and commitments). Charles Tittle's control balance theory (1995) tried to repair this by distinguishing two types of control — control over others vs. control exerted by others — and arguing that imbalances in either direction produce different kinds of deviance (repressive when over-controlled, autonomous when under-controlled).

Copy sourceZoom

Social exclusion

Social exclusion is a structural concept developed in 1980s European policy thinking to describe the inability to access the rights, resources, and participation that constitute social citizenship. It is not just poverty (inadequate income) but relational disadvantage — being shut out of the labour market, the school system, decent housing, and political voice. UK prison populations exhibit social-exclusion markers at extreme rates: in 2002, 72% had been on state benefits before incarceration (vs. 13.7% in the general population), 4.7% were sleeping rough (vs. 0.001%), 27% had been in local-authority care as children (vs. 2%), and over half the male prison population had no educational qualifications whatsoever (vs. 15%).

Social exclusion is also a powerful predictor of victimisation. Lone-parent households and the unemployed are roughly twice as likely as average to be burglary victims. Exclusion compounds: the more excluded you are, the more likely you are to be both perpetrator and victim, and the less able to obtain redress through formal justice.

Social harm

Social harm is a deliberate widening of criminology's gaze beyond the criminal law. The starting observation, traceable to Edwin Sutherland, is that the criminal-justice system discriminates between crimes of the powerful (treated as civil or regulatory matters) and crimes of the powerless (treated as criminal). Herman and Juliet Schwendinger extended this in 1970 by asking whether criminology should care about "social order" or about human rights. If the latter, then deaths and injuries from avoidable accidents, treatable illness, pay discrimination, toxic-waste dumping, and climate change should be on criminology's agenda even when they are not "criminal" in legal terms.

The contemporary articulation by Hillyard and colleagues makes the linkages global: impoverishment of African and Asian populations, over-exploitation of natural resources, climate-driven desertification, and human trafficking are not separate phenomena but components of a single harm-generating system that criminal law fails to address.

Socialisation

Socialisation is the process by which individuals learn norms, values, and the practical skills of social role-performance. For control theorists, failed socialisation explains delinquency — the bonds didn't form, the conscience didn't internalise. For biological criminologists, socialisation is overrated relative to inherited disposition. For most contemporary criminologists, it's somewhere in between, with the family, school, and peer group as the three main socialising agents. The concept's main risk is the "over-socialised" view of human beings — treating people as the passive products of social forces without acknowledging agency.

The state

There is no single agreed definition of the state. Common usage treats it as the institutions through which political power is exercised, with "government" as the means of accessing those institutions. Pluralist accounts treat the state as a neutral arena where competing interest groups bargain. Marxist accounts (Karl Marx: "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie") see the state as the political organ of the ruling class. Weberian accounts define the state by its monopoly of legitimate violence within a defined territory and analyse it as bureaucratic rule by officials.

Stuart Hall and colleagues' Policing the Crisis (1978) developed an influential criminological account of the state as a site of hegemonic struggle, where political, industrial, and media coalitions use crime fears (1970s urban disorder, today's terrorism) to legitimise increasingly authoritarian responses to underlying economic and political crises.

State crime

State crime is criminology's largest historical blind spot. The reason is structural: criminology has tended to take state-defined criminality as its starting point, which means the state itself disappears as a potential perpetrator. William Chambliss defined state crime as "acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in the pursuit of their job"; Kramer and Michalowski extended it to include international-law violations and acts the state failed to control or prevent.

State crimes fall into three broad types:

• Political control crimes — election fraud, bribery, intimidation of opposition, censorship.
• Crimes committed via the state's violence monopoly — torture, assassination, ethnic cleansing, genocide, illegal war (e.g. the 2003 invasion of Iraq under Kramer and Michalowski's analysis).
• State-corporate crimes — forced labour, health-and-safety violations causing worker deaths, illegal expropriation of resources.

The argument is not just that states sometimes commit crimes but that, in scope and seriousness, state-perpetrated harms outweigh citizen-on-citizen crimes — yet criminology has historically attended overwhelmingly to the latter.

Practical application

The S-cluster gives you a structured way to interrogate any "crime problem" claim — by zooming the lens out from the offender to the institutions, harms, and powers that frame what counts as crime in the first place.

Example

A regional health authority publishes a report showing that 800 people in a single year died from preventable hospital-acquired infections. The same year, the local police service reports six homicides in the same region. The political response treats the homicides as the urgent matter (extra patrols, public meetings, ministerial statements); the infection deaths get a brief paragraph in a hospital-management report.

A social-harm criminologist would put the two numbers next to each other and ask the obvious question — which event killed more people? Both involve negligence or design failure; both were preventable; both fall under formal accountability regimes. But only one is treated as crime because only one fits the legal-institutional category. The same year, a state-crime analyst might notice that immigration detention deaths and police-custody deaths in the same region — also preventable, also institutionally caused — were neither prosecuted nor counted in any "violent crime" statistic. The cluster of choices the public discourse makes about what to count as crime is itself a political act that the S-concepts help you see and name.

A control-theory analyst, working on the homicide cases specifically, would notice that the offenders share a profile: weak family attachments in adolescence, no completed schooling, no employment history, no community involvement. The intervention follow-up doesn't need new criminology — it needs to rebuild the four bonds Hirschi described, decades earlier than the point at which the homicide became inevitable.

Related lessons