Pamela Davies

Making visible the invisible

Having digested the breadth, range and focus of the particular chapters contained within this volume the reader should by now be acutely aware of the complexity of the task we set ourselves. Also, having contracted, collated and edited the various contributions over the past year or so, we are also now much more aware of the complexity of the task we set ourselves! To recap, that task was to critically review a range of acts and events taking place at the end of the twentieth century which in our view remained to a greater or lesser extent hidden, and to map their particular contours under the generic title Invisible Crimes: Their Victims and Their Regulation.

The Features of Invisible Crimes

A wide range of events and actions is described in this book. This range includes, first, crimes committed by employees against organisations for which they work; such as using an organisation’s facilities illegally and stealing work-based materials for personal use. A second example is that of crimes perpetrated by organisations against their employees; and include breaches of health and safety regulations resulting in workplace injuries, illnesses, accidents and sometimes deaths. Third, there are examples of fraudulent behaviour; including the use of another’s money for personal or organisational gain without their knowledge or consent, and the use of ‘sleaze’ money to change the course of events, such as in political life or in the field of sport and leisure. Fourth, the range encompasses hitherto neglected green crimes; including the pollution of the environment by industrial organisations. Green crimes extend across international boundaries fuelled by the erosion of geographic and trade barriers between countries, and raise important issues regarding enforcement, regulation and control at the end of the twentieth century (South, 1997). For example, in March 1998 environmental ministers from the world’s seven richest countries met in London to plan a strategy for dealing with the rapid growth in the smuggling of toxic waste, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which destroy the ozone layer, and endangered species and products produced from them. Indeed, it has been estimated that such smuggling is worth up to £24 billion per year, making it the biggest illegal trade after drug trafficking. A fifth category addressed in this volume concerns that given the generic label ‘cybercrime’. This includes computer crimes, such as hacking, the illegal appropriation of image and likeness and the use of the Internet in order to sell drugs, to publish obscene materials or to advertise services in relation to paedophilia.

Green crime and victimization: Tensions between social and environmental justice

In 2011, Rio Tinto Alcan, one of the world’s largest producers of aluminium, announced the closure of the smelter at Lynemouth, Northumberland, north-east England. The plant, a major local employer, finally closed in March 2013. This article examines global concerns about environmental emission standards and the costs of compliance. This plant’s closure is a success in green terms. However, where closure is officially considered a compliance option, costs to deprived communities are high. From a (green) victimological perspective, the article contemplates the hidden costs of closure on already deprived local and regional communities. The discussion focuses on how green crime and green compliance creates victimization and reflects on the moral and ethical challenges this presents for a green criminology.

‘Me’, ‘Me’, ‘Me’: The Use of the First Person in Academic Writing and Some Reflections on Subjective Analyses of Personal Experiences

This research note discusses being self-conscious methodologically. It illustrates my pains to be deeply reflexive about research and academic writing. It does so with reference to a personal experience that raised, as feminist research often does, emotional as well as intellectual issues. It specifically explores the use of the first person in academic writing. Writing as ‘I’ forced comparisons between the personal and impersonal which in turn have caused me to reflect more deeply on emotive, individual and subjective analyses of personal experiences. With reference to a case study of ‘me’, this note is a reminder of the materiality and sociality of writing. It shows how social scientists have emotions about the subjects they study. Furthermore, it demonstrates implications for parental experience studies research and policy and practice in child and family social work.

Is Economic Crime a Man’s Game?

In researching women’s involvement in economic crime, the concept of the ‘economic’ is problematic. Women’s crime for economic gain and women’s crime in economic terms are inadequately catered for. In reviewing criminologists’ uses of the notion of ‘economic crime’ I suggest that criminological understandingin relation to crime for economic gain is poor and that gender freedom/blindness/specificity variously operate. This article provides an original feminist reading of contemporary work on crime and markets and rational choicetheory and relates this to feminist economic critiques in order to achieve agendering of the economy. The broad aims of the article are to illustratethe problematics of economic classifications and definitions in criminologyand to mount an argument that suggests the whole notion of the economic within criminology demands (feminist) critique.

Taking Invisible Crimes and Social Harms Seriously

In 1999, Jupp et al. mapped the contours of what they termed invisible crime and victimisation and considered the commonalities associated with this range of acts, events and experiences. They suggested that there are seven interacting and overlapping features that help make harms or crimes more or less invisible. These features are no knowledge, no statistics, no theory, no research, no control, no politics and no panic! The purpose of the book, entitled Invisible Crimes, Their Victims and Their Regulation (Davies et al. 1999), was fourfold. First, to explain why it was possible for particular types of crime, harm and injustice that clearly incurred suffering and victimisation to remain hidden and neglected, and therefore unregulated and uncontrolled. Second, to explore the occurrence, nature and impact of these ‘invisible crimes’ by bringing together the work of scholars undertaking innovative and challenging research in this area. In doing so, the book focused on white- collar crime, workplace crime — including health and safety crimes, illicit drug use, fraud and cybercrimes, and to an extent the book also mapped out a research agenda for this area. A third ambition was to demonstrate that a criminology informed by feminist, radical and critical traditions should continually refresh and reassess its ambitions by refocusing the ‘criminological telescope’ beyond what is typically encountered within the mainstream with a view to inform and intervene in the name of social justice.

Crime-Work Connections: Exploring the ‘Invisibility’ of Workplace Crime

This chapter uses the organising theme of crime and work connections to develop an understanding of criminal activity and its location or siting. In particular, the chapter focuses upon one location or site of criminal activity: the workplace. Criminal acts can be seen to thrive at the junctures between the legitimate and illegitimate. What is more, they not only thrive at the boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate but also within and between the formal and informal settings. The workplace is seen as hiding several forms of criminal activity, often ‘dressing up’ activities as acceptable business practice. In other instances the activities in the workplace are approaching the illegitimate and are near illegal but are nevertheless visible practices, often excused or rationalised as ‘perks of the job’. The chapter also evaluates the usefulness of the concept of work for understanding some types of crimes committed for economic gain. The crime-and-work connection also points to the ways in which crimes may be understood by those seeking to explain the behaviour and activities. It is argued that explanations of such crimes might more fully appreciate the offender’s perspective.

New Millennium ‘Blues’? Policing Past and Policing Futures

It is approximately four decades ago, during the 1950s, that the British police first came under the gaze of the sociological and criminological telescope, since which time policing and law enforcement have become central to much intellectual, popular and political discourse and debate. Conventional wisdom on the trajectory of this relatively short period, as Downes and Morgan (1994) succinctly put it, is generally apocalyptic; things have deteriorated irreversibly since the golden days of the 1950s and the future of the police and policing looks bleak. Indeed, for some commentators it is a period in which the community ‘plod’, epitomized by Ted Willis’s PC George Dixon, first in the 1950 film The Blue Lamp and later in the BBC television programme Dixon of Dock Green, has been replaced by the ‘reactive pig’ or ‘reluctant bobby’, with a visored ‘Robocop’ or ‘Darth Vader’ armed and waiting around the millennium corner.

Gender First: The secret to revealing sexual crimes and victimisations

This chapter examines the secrets to revealing sex crimes and victimisations. It does so in the context of broader social-structural and cultural silencing factors in the United Kingdom in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. Drawing on gendered theorising, the chapter illustrates how a predatory sexual paedophile was able to hide in plain sight and not be exposed for decades.

Women and Crime: doing it for the kids?

In recent years feminist theorizing around gender and crime has focused predominantly on women as victims in their own homes and communities rather than as offenders. From this same perspective, even those women convicted of criminal offences are often refrained as victims. This article outlines some of the evidence suggesting feminist criminology might reconsider women as offenders in order to more fully appreciate and understand the crimes that women commit within the environs of the local informal or criminal markets.