Overview of the session
Used traditionally to expand the notions of crime and in an attempt to broaden the boundaries of criminology enquiry ‘zemiology’, or
what is often referred to as a social harm approach, has been used to identify the harms associated with white-collar crimes (Sutherland, 1945), human rights violations (Schwendingers, 1970) and, more recently, harms that are ‘deleterious to people’s welfare from the cradle to the grave’ (Hillyard and Tombs, 2004:18).
During today’s session we will be exploring the various ways in which zemiology, or social harm, has been used to explain harms that often fall outside of traditional notions of crime. The various definitions of social harm will be explored and, drawing on the recent work of Pemberton (2016), we will consider one of the latest definitions of social harm.
