Stealing to Offer: A Market Reduction Approach

While Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) strategies come in many forms, the majority focus on identifying and developing ways to stop an offence taking place. Market Reduction Approaches, however, while sharing a similar crime reduction / elimination objective, are a little different because their focus is on preventing offenders profiting from various forms of economic crime, […]

Rational Choice Theory | 1a

If you’ve had a look at the Rational Choice Theory | 1 post and were wondering if there are further parts “in the pipeline”, the short answer is “Yes”. There will be a further part that gives RCT a good critical kicking the once-over in terms of weaknesses and limitations. I’ve written most of it […]

Rational Choice Theory | 1

This first of two posts on Rational Choice Theory (RCT) provides an overview of a key New Right theory whose central argument about criminal rationality underpins a range of later Right Realist explanations for crime. Rational Choice Theory (RCT) is one of a group of theories – including Broken Windows and Routine Activities Theory – […]

Shortcuts to Crime and Deviance: Women and Crime

While the first film in the Gender and Crime series looked at the ideas of Gendering Crime (in every society males commit far more crimes than females) and masculinity as an explanation for greater male criminal involvement, this second film – once again built around interviews with Professor Sandra Walklate – focuses on women and […]

Shortcuts to Crime and Deviance: Gendering the Criminal

Professor Sandra Walklate talks about the relationship between gender and crime and explains how and why masculinity offers a partial, but not necessarily sufficient, explanation for the over-representation of young men in the crime statistics. • Gender and crime• Masculinity • Femininity• Gender socialisation• Edgework (Lyng)• Cultural expectations of masculinity• Masculinity and the public domain• […]

The Crime and Deviance Channel

The Crime and Deviance Channel now offers a wide range of free Text, PowerPoint, Audio and Video resources organised into 5 categories: 1. Theories 2. Social Distribution 3. Power and Control 4. Globalisation 5. Research Methods Each category contains a mix of content: • Text materials range from complete pdf chapters to a variety of […]

The Dark Side of Family Life: Domestic Abuse

The issue of domestic abuse has hit the headlines recently with the start of both the 2018 World Cup and not-uncoincidentally, a “Give Domestic Abuse the Red Card” campaign promoted by a range of police forces and widely-reported in both old and new media. The campaign highlights the relationship between domestic violence (defined in terms […]

Youth Subcultures: The Changing Face of Gangs

Unlike in the USA, where the study of “gangs” and “gang culture” – from “Street Corner Society” to “Gang Leader for A Day” – is firmly embedded in the sociological mainstream, the empirical study of UK gangs is fairly limited. This makes it all the more interesting that, over the past 10 years, Waltham Forest […]

Get Back The Heartbeat: A Film about Social Control

Around 10 years ago I was contacted by a French film student asking permission to use something I’d written about social control as the basis for a Sociology lecture to be featured in a short film they were producing and directing. I’d forgotten all about it until I was rooting around in a bookcase looking […]

Sociology and You: A Free Textbook

This American High School textbook just scrapes into the “published in the 21st century” criterion I set myself for finding free, out-of-print sociology texts, but I’ve included it because although it’s obviously a little dated – at least in terms of content if not necessarily design – Sociology and You (2001) was probably one of […]

An Open-Source Sociology Textbook

A free (open-source) Sociology textbook (plus resources) that could be used to supplement your existing textbooks and classroom resources. While the idea of “open-source software” – programs created, modified and freely distributed to users who also contribute in various ways to their subsequent development – has long-been a feature of digital technology, it seems a […]

Sociology Revision Booklets: 4. Crime and Deviance

As you might expect, given its status as one of the most-popular a-level sociology options, when it comes to revision resources for crime and deviance both teachers and students are rather spoilt for choice. I’ve decided, therefore, to split this post into two parts (probably – there may be more): the first (this one) has […]

More GCSE Sociology Revision Stuff

While it’s possible to put-together a very reasonable – and reasonably comprehensive – set of revision resources from stuff that teachers have put on the web, there are a couple of things you should do before committing yourself to using these materials: 1. Check they are for your Specification – you don’t want to be […]

Learning Mats

Learning mats – originally laminated sheets containing simple questions, learning prompts and drawing spaces – have been around for some time at the lower (particularly primary) levels of our education system, but with the increasing interest in Knowledge Organisers, which in many respects they resemble, they’re starting to gain some traction at both GCSE and […]

Yet More Sociology Knowledge Organisers

The Learning Tables and Knowledge Organisers we’ve recently posted were all for the AQA Specification and while there’s a good deal of crossover between this Specification and OCR I thought it would be helpful to those following the latter if they had some KO’s to call their own. These Organisers, all produced by Lucy Cluley, […]