| As abolitionists have established, notions of "crime" offer a peculiarly blinkered vision of the range of misfortunes, dangers, harms, risk and injuries that are a routine part of everyday life. If the criminological intent is to reveal the extent of social harm, then the concept of "crime" has to be rejected as its sole justification and object of inquiry. However, while the concept of harm is clearly capable of broadening criminology's horizons and radically unsettling its traditional agenda, it continues to operate within a discursive frame of the negative. When we acknowledge that harm is not only a source of fear, but also a source of fascination and entertainment, we are faced with a quite different set of possibilities. The way we enjoy violence, humiliation and hurt casts doubt on the universal applicability of harm as always connoting trouble, fear, loss and so on. The pleasure in creating harm, or doing wrong or breaking boundaries is also part of the equation and neds to be thought through. This paper explores the possibilities and potentialities for criminology of fusing the concerns of European abolitionism with those of American cultural criminology. |
Updated 05/20/2006