Tuesday 11 December 2012

Week 12: Ethnicity and victimisation

"I think we should consider the possibility that this attempted murder was a hate crime."
"What, as opposed to one of those 'I really, really like you' type of murders?"
- Life on Mars

This week we took the approach of radical victimology, with its stress on power and injustice as the context for crime, and applied it to a different area: ethnicity and 'race'.

Radical victimology starts from the basis that some people hold power over others, and do so in ways that are unaccountable and unjust. Is this a useful way of thinking about ethnicity? It's certainly not true to say that every member of an ethnic minority is less powerful than every White person. Nor is it true to say that all White people would discriminate against Asians (for example) if they had the chance - any more than all Asians would discriminate against Whites.

The point is more about the relationship between prejudice and power. This country, like many others, has a long history of discrimination against ethnic minorities: fifty or a hundred years ago it would have been completely routine and unsurprising to see positions of power reserved for White people, and to see those people using their power in discriminatory ways. This is no longer normal or acceptable, but it still goes on - and it's no secret that there are people who would like it to be normal and acceptable again. Because of that history, and because those discriminatory values do still survive, the White majority - on the scale of society as a whole - has a power that ethnic minorities don't have: the power to discriminate, in ways that have a major effect on people's life chances. It's not a coincidence that black and minority ethnic people are significantly more likely to live in poorer areas - and, as a result, significantly more likely to become victims of crime, including 'normal' crimes with no racial motivation. This is the sense in which ethnicity, and the more-or-less imagined categories of 'race', has to do with power and injustice.

Whether it's useful to talk about racist crime in terms of 'hate crime' is another question; the police certainly think it is. Personally I'm sceptical; this is partly for the reason given by Gene Hunt, partly because I think the 'hate crime' label is too general. If members of any group can be a victim of 'hate crime', then 'hate crime' is purely about irrational prejudice - and not about power and histories of injustice. I think losing that background makes racist crime harder, not easier, to explain and to challenge.

Tuesday 4 December 2012

Week 11: Corporate crime

This week and next week are a two-parter to round off the term; they both look at different aspects of radical victimology. Next week we'll be looking at ethnicity as a factor in crime, including crimes which aren't overtly racist in nature or motivation. This week we looked at corporate crime: crimes and other serious harms committed by businesses.

What these very different types of crime have in common is that they both take place against the backdrop of unequal power relations, which affect both the likelihood of becoming a victim of crime and the likelihood of gaining recognition as a victim. Businesses large and small have much more power over us than we do over them, and in some cases the power they have is exercised in unlawful ways: selling us sub-standard products, persuading us to buy insurance policies we can never claim on, ordering us to work excessive hours.

Even when it takes directly life-threatening forms, corporate crime has a tendency to remain invisible - "man crushed by machinery at workplace" may be an item on the local news but it won't make the national press, and it won't get into the crime statistics. Nobody knows how much law-breaking goes on in business. One reason for this is that business regulation - the main approach used to control commercial rule-breaking - has a strong orientation towards gaining compliance rather than prosecuting wrong-doers. Where prosecution is used, it is used as a last resort: inspectors will try to get managers to co-operate, then use the threat of prosecution to try and induce compliance. Actually taking a company to court is an implicit admission that other methods have failed, and is almost a punishment in itself.

As we saw in the seminar, there are good reasons for using this 'responsive', compliance-oriented approach: being treated with respect encourages managers and employees to commit themselves to the rules being enforced, rather than just treating them as a box-ticking exercise. The more punitive approach of prosecuting everything that can be prosecuted leads to stressed and demotivated staff, who only care about sticking to the rules because they're afraid they'll lose their jobs. (That's the theory, at any rate; in practice the results may be more mixed.) But even if it does produce better results, with less disruption, than a more punitive approach, there's a question-mark over the responsive approach when it comes to the victims of corporate crime.

Should corporate criminals always be prosecuted for the sake of doing justice to the victims? Or are the victims better served by regulation that leads to better practices being adopted, so that there are fewer victims in future?