This unique collection explores the continuing invisibility of much crime and victimization, and the lack of adequate responses to them. Shaping the lens through which criminology and victimology is approached in the twenty-first century, the volume examines major issues including (in)justice, risks, rights, regulation and enforcement.

Invisible Crimes is an edited volume containing a collection of articles from a distinguished panel of academics. The book explores many features of 'invisible' crimes and in doing so provides numerous examples of hidden crimes and victimisations. The book will be invaluable to students of criminology at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. It will also inspire academics from a range of disciplines to update, rewrite and offer new courses on neglected crimes and victimisations.

This book assesses the role aesthetic factors play in shaping what forms of mass violence are viewed as international crimes.

This collection revisits Steven Box’s book, Power, Crime and Mystification, published in 1983, and considers its relevance forty years on. It introduces the critical analysis developed by Box which examined corporate crime, police crime, rape and sexual assault and female crime and analyses the continuities and discontinuities since 1983 in relation to crime, the state and the exercise/mystification of power. The book explores the ways in which we can see his influence nationally and internationally on critical criminological, zemiological and abolitionist writings today. It asks how can these perspectives be applied to a critical analysis of contemporary, state authoritarianism and the criminal injustice that this authoritarianism generates? Additionally, how can Box’s concepts shine a critical light on contemporary social harms that were not covered in the original book? The collection provides a toolkit for students and academics to critically analyse the issues around crime/social harm, power/powerlessness, truth/mystification, criminal injustice/social justice as well as historical and contemporary sites of resistance confronting the exercise of state power.

The Myth of the ‘Crime Decline’ seeks to critically interrogate the supposed statistical decline of crime rates, thought to have occurred in a number of predominantly Western countries over the past two decades. Whilst this trend of declining crime rates seems profound, serious questions need to be asked. Data sources need to be critically interrogated and context needs to be provided. This book seeks to do just that. This book examines the wider socio-economic and politico-cultural context within which this decline in crime is said to have occurred, highlighting the changing nature and landscape of crime and its ever deepening resistance to precise measurement. By drawing upon original qualitative research and cutting edge criminological theory, this book offers an alternative view of the reality of crime and harm. In doing so it seeks to reframe the ‘crime decline’ discourse and provide a more accurate account of this puzzling contemporary phenomenon. Additionally, utilising a new theoretical framework developed by the author, this book begins to explain why the ‘crime decline’ discourse has been so readily accepted. Written in an accessible yet theoretical and informed manner, this book is a must-read for academics and students in the fields of criminology, sociology, social policy, and the philosophy of social sciences.

This book outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to argue that these act as the basis for an activist zemiology, one directed towards social change for social justice. The past two decades have seen a proliferation of debate related to social harm in and around criminology. From climate catastrophe and a focus on environmental harms, unprecedented deaths generating focus on border harms and the coronavirus pandemic revealing the horror of mass and arguably avoidable deaths across the globe, critical studies in social harm appear ever more pressing. Drawing on a range of international case studies of cultural, emotional, physical and economic harms, From Social Harm to Zemiology locates the study of social harm in an accessible fashion. In doing so it sets out how a zemiological lens can moves us beyond many of the problematic legacies of criminology. This book rejects criminologies which have disproportionately served to regulate intersectional groups, and which have arguably inflicted as much or more harm by bolstering the very ideologies of control in offering minor reforms that inadvertently expand and strengthen states and corporations. It does this by sketching out the contours, objects, methods and ontologies of a disciplinary framework which rejects commonplace assumptions of ‘value freedom’. From Social Harm to Zemiology advocates social change in accordance with groups who are most disenfranchised, and thus often most socially harmed. An accessible and compelling read, this book is essential reading for all zemiologists, critical criminologists, and those engaged with criminological and social theory.

While the notion of social harm has long interested critical criminologists it is now being explored as an alternative field of study, which provides more accurate analyses of the vicissitudes of life. However, important aspects of this notion remain undeveloped, in particular the definition of social harm, the question of responsibility and the methodologies for studying harm. This book, the first to theorise and define the social harm concept beyond criminology, seeks to address these omissions and questions why some capitalist societies appear to be more harmful than others. In doing so it provides a platform for future debates, in this series and beyond. It will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers across criminology, sociology, social policy, socio-legal studies and geography.