Globalisation

Globalisation

• -leads to greater cultural diversity, western ideas have spread and engulfed other forms of local culture.
• Castells - globalisation has lead to a global criminal economy, with more opportunities for crime and new crime types have emerged.
• Human trafficking - buying and selling of people for exploitation is prolific. People are smiggled illegally from one part of the world to another. The people trafficked are used for slavery, prostitution and sometimes sexual exploitation.
• Illegal drugs trading - increasingly globalised as drug smugglers operate across national boundaries.
• Cybercrime - connected to the internet such as identity theft, computer theft, fraud and phishing as well as abuse against children.

State crimes/Human rights

• -state is responsible for making and enforcing the law but sometimes they break it, such as genocide, war crimes, torture, assassination.
• Hitler started a program that killed 275,000 mental and terminally ill patients.
• Human rights - suggests that everyone because of their common humanity is entitled to the same fair treatment wherever they are. State crimes are linked because they breach human rights.
• Cohen - there are 3 stages of state denial
• 1. denial - it didnt happen
• 2. relabelling - its something else
• 3. excusing - its justified.
• Green and Ward - human rights have now become a global social norms. However, there is till harm in the wider context such as poverty/famine.

Green Crime

• -crime against the environment. Threats to the eco system are increasingly global. Atmospheric pollution from one country can turn into acid rain for another. (England and Wales - Sweden Pine Forest)
• Beck - argues that in todays society we are able to provide our own resources, through manufacturing. However, with this comes a manufacturing risk meaning it can cause harm to the environment.
• 1.Traditional Criminology - does not concern itself with the environment harm, it focuses on the written laws.
• 2. Environmental criminology - is radical. White argues that the real subject of criminology is any action that harms the physical environment and/or the human and non-human species within it.

Victimology explanations

• Positive Victimology: Tierney - takes a positivist approach to identifying what makes victims different. He suggested that there are two factors: proneness - based on individual characteristics, or backgrounds (ethnicty). And precipitation - where victims are active or to blame for the crimes against them (the controversial debate about women wearing provocative clothing).
• Radical/critical victimology: based on conflict theories which assume victims are the result of wider issues in society e.g. men are socialised into believing they have power over women or that the police see EMs as perpetrators so they do not warrant protection.

Who are the victims of crime

• Gender - women fear burglary and violent/intimate crimes more than men. However the reality of crime is that young men are most likely to be victims of violent crimes. Women also fear attacks on them by the "stranger in the night" when in actual fact 84% of sexual assaults on women are by someone they know.
• Age - Elderly people have a high fear of crime. Whereas young people are 9 times more likely to be at risk than those over 75. This is because the young people are in riskier situations.
• Ethnicity - Minority groups are more likely to be victims of crime. Corcan found that there is an average of 106,000 racially motivated crimes in Britain each year.
• Class - While people from middle class backgrounds fear crime, the most likely victims are the poorest people in areas of deprivation. There is an "inverse victimisation" law where the poorest people are the most likely victims and perpetrators.