Social harm
Can criminologists make equal justice between ‘crime’ and ‘social harm’? Throughout the years, the ‘problem of crime’ has been a long debated subject due to its complexity. At some point, it was a matter of different regions, cultures, and particular laws that made it difficult for people to argue whether a certain thing was a crime or not. In spite of this fact, this problem still exists-for example: if, in one country a particular thing can be a right, in another one it can be a crime-such as abortion. In relation to this topic, this essay is going to focus on two important concepts - that of ‘crime’ and that of ‘social harm’, including general definitions, the context in which they can be found, dissimilarities between the two, and the paper will further discuss the types of criminal activity that the two ideas cover. This paper will focus firstly on daily crimes, secondly on white-collar and corporate crimes and it will conclude with a general summarization of the topics and will attempt to clarify which of the two is more relevant to criminologists. Not only has ‘crime’ received a very limited meaning in the past, in terms of variety, but also the concept was categorized simply as a physical or emotional injury to the individual. ‘Crime is not a self-evident and unitary concept. Its constitution is diverse, historically relative and continually contested. As a result, an answer to the question ‘what is crime?’ depends upon which of its multiple constitutive elements is emphasized. This in turn depends upon the theoretical position taken by those defining crime’.Therefore, crime is a process of negotiation and constant struggle over time, but there are some crimes that have been omitted only because society never took into consideration those other crime related problems that can affect an entire population, crimes that have come to be known as a new concept, that of ‘social harm’.