Crime Problem
Crime and its consequences are of a big concern of the modern society that influences different spheres of our life. We always have to deal with the results and consequences of the committed crime which are usually horrifying and the whole society is at shock, perplexed and scandalized. However we need to dig deeper to see the whole problem from the inside on why these crimes take place in the modern society where everything seems to be equally distributed in the world of civilization and democracy. Crimes are committed by people who have certain values and views in life and we all draw our values and attitudes from childhood, from our family and surroundings.
The ‘crime problem’ is a term filled with ambiguity and controversy, but is generally associated
with the dominant representations of crime. Such representations tend to encompass ‘visible’ crime, that is, crime that takes place in the public sphere, such as street crime, property crime and stranger danger. Indeed, it is these types of crime that are ‘the bread and butter of popular journalism’, and as such, the press media help shape the commonsense view that the public sphere is rife with danger. This perception leads to demands, by both the public and the media, that politicians and policy makers concentrate resources on tackling such crimes.
Implicit in the dominant representation of the crime problem is the association of the intimate world of ‘the family’ with privacy and safety. Indeed, placing ‘crime’ in the public sphere tends to marginalize, and at times render invisible, serious harms occurring in the domestic arena. However, this essay will demonstrate that the nature and extent of familial violence is such that, by tackling violence in the family home effectively, the government could make a serious impact on at least one aspect of the crime problem.
Despite there being a plurality of household arrangements and family forms, the ideology of the family informs popular understandings as to what constitutes the ‘normal’ family. The traditional nuclear family is structured around prescribed gender roles and is made up of a male breadwinner, the head of the household, his homemaker wife and their children. It is an institution imbued with relationships of dependency, and is seen to be a self-regulatory, private, safe and harmonious retreat from the outside world.
However, it is evident that this normative view masks many serious harms inflicted on women and children in the domestic setting.
These figures demonstrate the prevalence of familial violence, and lead us to question why such crimes receive far less press attention, and in turn fewer resources to tackle them, than those occurring in the public sphere. Chibnall suggests that offences of this nature lack the ’spectacular newsworthiness’ of criminal acts taking place on the street. These stories tend to be narratives structured around the binary opposites of the stereotypical ‘dangerous stranger’ and the innocent victim, thus simplifying issues which in reality are very complex.
However, the marginalization of domestic crimes may also be explained as the result of discourses of the normal family, which allow for a certain amount of violence between spouses, and view the physical disciplining of children as an understandable aspect of family life with the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ playing a major role in family policy and Acts of parliament since the 1800s. Indeed, “some form of physical violence in the life cycle of family members is so likely that it can be said to be almost universal violence is as typical of family relationships as is love.”
These discourses also emphasize the privacy of this institution, and as such it must be stressed that statistics concerning the prevalence of violence in the home may underestimate the extent of such occurrences, since victims of domestic violence and child abuse may not consider them to have been
on the receiving end of a ‘crime’. Even if they do they may not be in a position to act upon such violence, given their relative powerlessness within the family.
Another set of discourses that worked to reinforce this view were those propounded by welfare professionals, particularly influential in the post-war years, though still featuring heavily in current policy thinking on child abuse.
Within these discourses, family violence is seen to be the product of individual pathology, and usually seen to occur only in dysfunctional families. In the field of child abuse, welfare discourses, along with discourses of the normal family worked together to ensure that physical abuse was, and indeed in all but the most extreme cases still is, seen as a welfare issue, to be dealt with by the social services rather than within the criminal justice system.
Following the 1948 Children Act, the aim of welfare policy was to keep children within the family wherever possible. Welfare professionals increasingly used the family systems model to explain the causes of familial violence, claiming there were no victims or abusers, but ‘problem families’. Thus, for example, when the father committed an act of violence upon his child, the mother was also implicated. Violence within the family was seen as a social problem rather than a crime, and as such intervention was based upon support and rehabilitation, through family therapy, rather than punishment of the offender.
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