03 Section B Option 1, Key question 1 - Crime, deviance and social control (part 1)
The same behaviour can be condemned by one group, accepted by another and treated differently when a law changes. This lesson explains the distinction between crime and deviance, how social control maintains social order, and how rules acquire authority. These ideas help us ask what a crime count actually counts before treating it as a simple picture of behaviour.
Distinguishing crime and deviance
Crime and deviance are connected concepts, but they ask different questions about behaviour.
Crime and deviance
Crime is an act or omission that breaches criminal law in the relevant jurisdiction. Deviance is behaviour that departs from a social group's norms or expectations. A norm is an expectation about appropriate conduct in a particular social setting.
A jurisdiction is the area in which a particular legal authority operates. To decide whether an act is criminal, we need the relevant law, place, time and circumstances. Disapproval alone does not make an act a crime. Nor does the absence of an arrest make a criminal act lawful: a breach can go undetected.
To judge deviance, identify the reference group and setting. Laughing loudly may fit a comedy performance but break the expected silence during a memorial service. The physical action alone cannot establish its social meaning. Being statistically unusual is also insufficient: an exceptional musical ability is uncommon without necessarily violating a norm.
The following are original teaching scenarios, not observations of a real school or peer group. Assume the stated legal and social conditions apply.
| Situation | Classification in the stated context | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Someone steals another pupil's phone; the pupils strongly condemn theft. | Criminal and deviant relative to those pupils. | It breaches criminal law and their norm against stealing. |
| A pupil wears a permitted bright outfit at an event where their friends expect dark clothing; the friends disapprove. | Deviant relative to those friends, without being criminal. | It breaches their clothing expectation, but no criminal law in the scenario. |
| A group approves of a member possessing a drug, although its possession is prohibited by the law applying there. | Criminal, but accepted within that peer group's informal norms. | The peer group does not control the criminal law. |
| A pupil waits their turn where both the law and the group's expectations permit this. | Neither criminal nor deviant in that context. | It breaches neither relevant rule. |
Calling the third act “criminal but not deviant” always needs that qualification about the group. It still breaches a formal legal norm and may be condemned by other groups. Conversely, a school rule can be formal without being criminal law. A school uniform breach does not become a crime merely because the rule is written down.
How social control maintains order
Social order exists when social life has enough regularity for people to anticipate one another's conduct.
Order makes cooperation possible: passengers can board a bus because they broadly understand how tickets, queues and turns work. It does not mean that everyone agrees with every rule, that rules are fair or that conflict disappears. A society can maintain an unequal order.
Social control refers to the processes that encourage conformity to norms and discourage rule-breaking. Socialisation, the learning of social expectations through interaction, helps people internalise norms. Someone may wait their turn because they believe it is right, even when nobody is watching. Control also works externally through sanctions, responses that reward conformity or penalise departures from expectations.
Formal social control operates through authorised roles, explicit rules and organised procedures. Criminal courts imposing a sentence are one example. A school awarding a conduct certificate or imposing a detention under its disciplinary rules is another: formal control extends beyond the criminal justice system. Informal social control occurs through everyday interaction, such as praise, ridicule, disapproving looks or withdrawal of friendship. A sanction is positive when it rewards behaviour and negative when it penalises it; positive does not mean morally good, nor negative morally bad.
Consider an original workplace example. A manager issues a written warning under the employer's lateness procedure. Colleagues also stop inviting the late employee to share a lift. The warning is formal because it invokes an authorised organisational process. The exclusion is informal because it arises through relationships. Either may encourage punctuality: one threatens employment consequences; the other threatens belonging. If colleagues instead admire lateness as resistance to an unfair timetable, informal expectations could weaken formal control. Different controls need not reinforce one another.
A consensus approach emphasises shared values and how learning and enforcing rules enable cooperation. A conflict approach asks whose preferred order is maintained and whose interests enforcement serves. These are questions to investigate, rather than reasons to assume either universal agreement or that every law benefits only a powerful minority.
Relativity across time, societies and groups
Relativity means that classifications of crime and deviance depend on their historical and social context.
Change over time
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised private consensual sexual acts between two men aged 21 or over in England and Wales, subject to restrictions. It did not introduce complete equality or remove every relevant offence. The original Act and Parliament's historical briefing document the limits of this reform. The example shows how an established criminal category can be altered through legislation. It does not show that everyone's attitudes changed at once. Sexual Offences Act 1967, sections 1–2 and 11; House of Lords Library.
The sociological reasoning is to hold the conduct and relevant circumstances as constant as possible and ask what changed in the rule. A legal reform can remove criminal status without the conduct itself becoming physically different. Informal condemnation may persist after legal change; informal acceptance can also develop before a law changes. A person's sexual identity is not itself evidence of harmful or criminal behaviour.
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