How would you define crime? According to Google, a crime is defined as an action or omission which constitutes an offence and is punishable by law and deviance, a state of diverging from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behaviour. However, I believe that a crime cannot be accurately defined because it is socially constructed. This means that people in society have different opinions on what a crime actually is for example in Switzerland, it is illegal to own only one guinea pig because it may get lonely. Also, Singapore does not allow you to smoke in public at all whilst some countries regulate where you can smoke and in the USA, smoking is regulated by both federal, state and local laws.

Youth crime is a social problem because it affects people in society negatively. Did you know that the cost of dealing with young offenders to the criminal justice services in 2008 and 9 came up to £4 billion a year. A truly shocking amount! Furthermore, 42% of first time offenders are young adults with 70,000 school age children entering the young justice system. In fact the number of 15-17 year olds in prison has more than doubled over the last 10 years. One way in which the government have attempted to reduce this is by working with schools to raise awareness. However if this is actually an efficient method of tackling this issue is ambiguous because there actually was a 41% increase post Brexit however perhaps this just means that more people are actually reporting it which surely is a positive thing right?

Nevertheless, have you ever wondered why people actually commit crimes even though they are aware of the consequences at risk? Well there are many explanations as to why this is such as the opportunity structure. Essentially, this explains how in areas with high levels of unemployment and low educational opportunities people will turn to crime to gain money or status. This is evident as a study found that young people from the areas of the Bronx, Harlem and Washington Heights were drawn to the underground drug industry to gain money. Many people also believe that criminal and deviant behaviour can be due to biological explanations so genetics cause people to be born criminals it has even been suggested that people with high cheekbones, large jaws and big ears have criminal traits.

However crime is usually associated with more deprived members of society but it is important to remember that the middle class also commit crimes but they are simply less detectable for example tax evasion, fraud and misuse of expense accounts. White collar crimes are ones that are committed by those higher on the social hierarchy and are conducted within the context of everyday business and the workplace and not on the streets. As a result this makes it difficult for these crimes to be discovered.

But where do we get these figures from and are they actually reliable. Well, there are actually 2 main sources of crime data; surveys of the public, for example victim surveys and self-report studies and the second source, official statistics recorded by the police and collected once a year by the Home Office. However inevitably, it is not possible for all crimes to be published, in sociology this is called the dark figure of crime which shows the crimes that have not been recorded or reported meaning that actually official statistics are inaccurate. In fact it has been estimated by the police that around 67% of household theft crimes and 64% of sexual assaults go unreported. However the advantages of official statistics are that we are still able to roughly allocate how many crimes are committed allowing us to compare and see trends overtime but we must not ignore the fact that it may give us false information.

by Umeh Jamiath, The Sydney Russell School