Page 2 - Flipbook: Sociology Shortcuts Issue 5: Situational Action Theory

CRIME AND SOCIAL

DISADVANTAGE

While the relationship between social disadvantage and crime has long
been known, an important question that’s often ignored is why only a
relatively small proportion of the socially disadvantaged seem to engage
in persistent criminal offending?
Wikstrom’s Situational Action Theory provides an interesting, thought-
provoking, possible answer…

THE CRIME PARADOX CRIME PARADOX

Most A-level crime and deviance students will quickly come to understand
the relationship between social disadvantage – what Wikström and
Treiber (2016) term “the comparative lack of social and economic
resources”- and various forms of persistent, mainly low-level, criminality,
overwhelmingly committed by young, lower class, males.
Crimes that involve relatively small levels of economic reward (arson,
vandalism, theft, shoplifting, robbery, car crime and burglary) or which
involve routine low-level violence (assault). In basic terms, social
disadvantage is generally seen as a cause of crime.
The problem with this characterisation, however, is that it’s both true –
statistically, most persistent offenders do come from a socially-
disadvantaged background (at least as far as the kinds of crimes we’ve
just listed are concerned) and not true: social disadvantage doesn’t, in and
of itself, cause crime because only a relatively small proportion of those
classified as socially disadvantaged become persistent offenders.
The majority do not.

Which is not something we would expect if the relationship was a causal
one.

Professor Per-Olof Wikstrom

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