Committing Criminology

This blog was never intended to play out as a sort of online diary. There are other ways to keep my parents informed, such as Skype.

This blog was initially intended to outline the academic stuff I do. Sometimes I did - I wrote a tips page for current (Dutch) undergraduates thinking of studying in the UK, and every once in a while I tried to give my opinion about politics, but I keep returning to diary-like posts.

And yet, for the last week I've been trying to write a post on gender equality, which should be serious enough. I ended up analysing the Boston Marathon Bombing-reporting in my Crime and Media paper, while instead I could've written about it here.

I suppose a blog name as 'Adventures' does not actually encourage many serious ideas either, which in turn easily leads me to turn to writing semi-diary posts. As some of you might know, I've been trying to find a new blog name for a while now, and I finally have found one.

The other day I attended one of the Scarman Lectures here, which was this time done by Dr Barbara Perry from the Uni of Ontario Institute of Technology, about islamophobia in Canada. Her lecture consisted mainly of anecdotes by victims of islamophobic violence. From these anecdotes it seemed apparent that much of that type of violence is justified by the offenders to themselves through a sort of Othering-mechanism (e.g. comments to go back to countries of origin), which upset me.

In my view, the things that upset me - gender inequality, Othering, ignorant politicians - all relate to one thing - the existent power structures. Crime and especially crime reporting relate to this too - calling a mugging criminal and banking fraud culture are very much in line still with Sutherland's crimes of the powerful and those of the powerless. Calling one set of behaviours criminal and immoral and the other not simply maintains existing power structures, and of course media representation of crime feeds especially into this by making criminals seem monstrous, non-human.

Which is also why I am writing my dissertation on how UK newspapers reported on the notion that multinationals companies that make large profits in the UK - Amazon, Google, Facebook, eBay, Starbucks, etc. - avoided paying taxes through accounting tricks. Technically, this is legal. Technically, this is not criminal. The newspapers, however, seem to think otherwise - though it is not strictly called criminal, it has by at least one paper explicitly been called immoral, while a number called for boycotting these companies. And several drew criminal justice process-analogies by terming Starbucks's decision to pay 20m in taxes over some years as pleading guilty. Which is a fascinating turn of events; a sort of pre-legislative criminalisation of corporate behaviour, which seems quite rare judging by the general apathy towards legislating against corporate misbehaviour that over and over again is apparent in corporate crime-literature.

I suppose it all, in the end, relates to my belief in true democracy, a more or less Aristotelian constitution - in which everyone is a citizen, i.e. with equal rights and the duty to consider what is in the advantage of society. In such a society, everyone would be seen as of equally human, whether rich or poor, sick or healthy, or in any other way advantaged or disadvantages, and everyone would have the duty to contribute to the best of their abilities. Indeed, if everyone did what they enjoyed best and what they are best at, there comes into existence a true free market, exchange of goods and services, and one would expect general utility to continue going up. I might come back to this at some point in the future, for I do have more to say on it.

Which is why any type of power structure that deprives any human, whether through stigma, through bad education (or none), through general violence, is immoral to me. Industrial organisation teaches that eventually, theoretically, monopolies should disappear because the continuing invasion of other companies trying to get into the market should force them to keep prices low, and those sorts of mechanisms. The same should work for incumbent power structures - if the powerless continue to invade the spheres of the powerful, at one point the power structures must change. Except that industrial economics don't always seem to take political (lack of) power and societal apathy into account.

This. This is the stuff I want to be writing about. I want to explore morality and equality and crime reporting, I want to go into adventures in the land of criminology. I want to continue. I want to discover what makes people violent and what can be done against harmful acts, whether criminal or legal, whether corporate or individual. I want to understand society.

Dr Perry referred to a statement by the Canadian PM, who took a dig at sociologists by saying that it was "not a time to commit sociology". But it is, of all the moments in all the centuries in all the past, this is it, and I want to commit criminology in my time.

So from now on this blog will called 'Committing Criminology', and I will be writing about serious things. Mostly.