Crime in England and Wales: March 2022
While the latest set of Official Crime Statistics covering England and Wales come with what should, by now, be the familiar methodological qualifications concerning both their reliability – or, more pertinently perhaps, their unreliability – and validity, they are nevertheless useful as general indicators of crime patterns. As such, they’re worth perusing if you have […]
Methods in Context: Crime in England and Wales
Keeping abreast of the various statistical sources and data on crime can be both time-consuming and somewhat confusing for teachers and students – both in terms of the volume of data and the reliability and validity of different data sources. For these reasons the Office for National Statistics statistical bulletin is a brilliant resource for […]
Victim Survey Report
The study of crime victims has, until quite recently, been a largely-neglected aspect of policing in England and Wales (and everywhere else come to that) so it may surprise you to know that since the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), there have been a succession of Victims’ Commissioners whose role is: “To promote […]
Home Office Research Findings
Between 1992 and 2008 the Home Office published around 250 “Research Fundings” – a heady mixture of sociological research, British Crime Survey data, evaluations of crime policies and the like – in a short-form that consisted of 4 – 6 pages built around summaries of: Key Points Methods and Methodology (where relevant) Key Findings Conclusions. […]
Harry Potter and the Functions of Crime?
Teaching something like Durkheim and the Functions of Crime can sometimes be a little difficult for students to grasp, so one way to make it more accessible might be to teach it by associating it with something more well-known and accessible, such as the Harry Potter books. More-specifically, Jenn Simms has drawn parallels between the […]
For A Few (A-Level Sociology) Organisers More
Every now and then – between creating short-but-beautifully-crafted films and resources that both push the a-level envelope and suggest interesting new ways of doing familiar things – I like to revisit old hits as a way of reassuring myself that, when it comes to creating interest and generating those sweet, sweet, Likes, you just can’t […]
Left Realism: Key Ideas and Criticisms
Left Realism is one of the major criminological theories at A-level and, for this reason, it’s one that students need to know well. The following, therefore, is a basic overview of Left Realism’s key ideas: from how they conceptualise crime through to what they see as the main problem of crime and possible solutions to […]
Left Realism: The Islington Crime Surveys 1986 – 2016
One of the initial features of Left Realism, as it was developed by writers such as Young, Matthews and Lea, was the use of a very particular survey method aimed at gathering large amounts of data about a relatively small location: the local crime survey carried-out, in this instance, by Young et. al. (1986) in […]
Crime and Deviance Study Guides
The great Crime Clear-Out continues with 3 Study Guides that I probably half-inched at some point from the Queen Elizabeth High School Moodle site (which is okay because whoever put them there – along with some other crime-related bits-and-bobs that might be worth a butcher’s – seems to have got them from Greenhead College). From […]
Globalisation and Crime
For someone who explicitly rejects the notion of “postmodernity” as it’s conventionally applied in sociology (and elsewhere come to that. I try not to discriminate) I seem to have spent a great deal of my time writing about it in one form of another. This has mainly, I think, been because if it’s a widely-used […]