What Are Crime, Deviance And Social Control? (continued)

Not all crime looks the same. A street mugging, a company quietly cheating its customers, a fraudster draining bank accounts from another country, a gang fighting over territory: these are all crimes, yet they differ in who commits them, who suffers and how likely they are to ever reach a courtroom. Sociologists sort crime into types so they can ask sharper questions, and they quickly discover something unsettling: the crime we can count is only a fraction of the crime that actually happens.

This lesson maps the main types of crime and then turns to a harder problem: how do we know how much crime there is at all? You will compare the three ways societies measure crime, weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each, and meet the famous dark figure of crime, the huge mass of offending that is never reported or recorded. By the end you will treat every crime statistic with the careful suspicion an examiner rewards.