What is Crime?

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 4
• Convenor: Professor Tanya Serisier
• Assessment: a 500-word skills workbook (25%) and 2000-word reflective journal (75%)

Regardless of our own status as victims, offenders, practitioners or observers, issues of crime and theories about crime pervade our lives on a day-to-day level. Television, newspapers, the internet, conversations with friends, families and colleagues all play their part in constructing discourse about crime.

In this module we introduce you to different ways of knowing about crime, from statistics to media to lived experiences of victims and offenders. We will ask about why some crimes, like street-level offences, receive so much public attention while others, like white collar or state crime, are rarely discussed. By carefully examining key criminological topics, questioning popular assumptions about these topics and developing a set of critical analytical skills, you will develop an awareness of the issues involved, without assuming any of the answers.

Indicative syllabus

• Crime over time - changing definitions
• Crime, harm and violence
• Deviance and criminalisation
• Measuring crime
• Crime and media - misrepresentation
• Labelling and moral panics
• Listening to victims 
• Engaging offenders
• Crimes of the powerful
• International harms and state crime

By the end of this module you will be able to:

• understand the different perspectives when defining ‘crime’
• place understandings of crime in historical context
• identify different media outlets and analyse their impact on crime
• reflect on different sources of information about crime and their impact on knowledge and popular understandings
• show evaluative and analytical skills when examining the problematic nature of ‘violence’
• analyse information and use it to critically examine the subject matter
• identify and apply key skills necessary to access relevant literature, and other sources necessary for criminological analysis and evaluation.