Crime in England and Wales: 2025

The latest edition of Crime in England and Wales, hot off the National Statistics press, has arrived with a dull thud on our doorstep and because you’re all probably way-too-busy Tik-Toking (or whatever “the kids” do nowadays in lieu of revision) I thought I’d do my usual Chicken Nuggets review (just the most tasty bits […]

Collections 5 | Flipbooks

The next Collection in a series that includes Learning Mats, Revision Resources, Simulations and the ever-popular Introductory Sociology, brings together all the Flipbook posts dotted around the Blog I could find and puts them into one handy cut-out-and-keep post. Research Methods The first four to be given the Flipbook treatment are actual, physical, book chapters […]

The Real CSI

The Centre for Social Investigation – not to be confused with the long-running TV series – was established at Nuffield College in 2014 as an “interdisciplinary research programme” with the aim of addressing “contemporary social issues of public interest”. To which end, the upshot of all this collaborative enterprise and expertise is an archive of […]

Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 5. Marxism

A broad overview of a range of different Marxist interpretations of crime and deviance in words and pictures Or, if you want to be picky, film. Marxist (or critical) theories of crime assume that no behaviour is inherently deviant. Behaviour only becomes criminalised through the creation and application of laws – and in capitalist societies […]

Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 4. Feminism

A short overview of Feminist perspectives on crime and deviance combining a bit of text with quite a lot of video. Feminist approaches are many and varied, but all, to varying extents, focus on women as both offenders and victims — partly as a response to what Sharp (2006) suggests has been the male bias […]

Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 3. Interactionism

A quick’n’dirty overview of the Interactionist perspective on crime and deviance. Two ideas closely associated with Interactionist approaches are those of deviance as both relative and socially constructed. Relativity refers to the idea that the same behaviour can be considered deviant in one context (or society) but non-deviant in another. A simple example here might […]

Explanations for Crime and Deviance: 1. Functionalism

A short set of Notes covering a range of Functionalist explanations for crime and deviance, largely based around the concepts of anomie (both the Durkheimian and Mertonian interpretations) and Strain (Merton again plus Agnew’s General Strain Theory). There’s also a little bit of subcultural stuff thrown-in for good measure. Traditional Functionalism Functionalist approaches are based […]

Defining and Measuring Crime

Some Notes that have been hanging around on my hard drive doing nothing useful that I’ve finally got around to posting. There are plenty more where these came from but whether or not I’ll ever get around to digging them out is anyone’s guess. Defining Crime and Deviance Deviance ‘To deviate’ means ‘to stray from […]

Crime Prevention Strategies: Plain Language Summaries

Although keeping up-to-date with the latest research is something that should happen in an ideal world, the reality is that few of us have either the time or inclination to: a. Find and read a whole bunch of often-obscure research publications. b. Summarise this meta-analysis in a pithy, student-friendly, way. c. Present the information so […]

Geographical Profiling Applied: The M25 Rapist

Continuing the recent Crime and Criminology vibe with our films (if you’re interested in Geographic Profiling you might also be interested in it’s better-known counterpart Offender Profiling), this companion-piece to Introducing Geographical Offender Profiling complements the original film by using the example of Antoni Imiela, the man the media dubbed the M25 Rapist because the […]

Tutor2U Teaching Activities

As many of you will already know, Tutor2U produces a shed-load of revision-type resources, from workbooks to flashcards to complete courses. Most of these can be purchased for varying amounts of cash (all major credit cards also accepted) but there’s plenty of stuff you can get for free in exchange for an email address (the […]

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 […]