Component 3 Section B: globalisation and crime (transnational organised crime, green crime, state crime), the media and crime (representation, moral panics and deviancy amplification), and surveillance and punishment (Foucault).

What this dot point is asking

OCR Component 3 Section B closes Crime and deviance with the contemporary themes: globalisation and crime (transnational, green and state crime), the media and crime (representation, moral panics), and surveillance and punishment (Foucault). These are highly synoptic, linking to globalisation, the digital world and inequality, and they are common in the longer essays.

The answer

Globalisation and crime

• Transnational organised crime: global networks enable drug and human trafficking, cybercrime and money laundering, moving money, goods and people across borders.
• Green crime: harm to the environment, often global and corporate (pollution, toxic-waste dumping, deforestation). A zemiology (social-harm) approach studies harm beyond what the law defines as crime.
• State crime: crimes committed by or with the approval of the state (war crimes, genocide, torture, human-rights abuses), often hidden because the state controls the law and can define its own actions as legal.

The media and crime

The media shape both the image and the reaction to crime. They over-represent violent and unusual crime, under-report corporate and white-collar crime, and can create a moral panic: exaggerated reaction labels a group as folk devils, as in Cohen's study of the Mods and Rockers, driving a deviancy amplification spiral in which media attention leads to more policing, more arrests and a self-fulfilling intensification of the problem. The media may also create fear of crime and stereotypes that shape policing.

Surveillance and punishment

Foucault contrasts sovereign power (public, physical punishment) with disciplinary power (constant surveillance that produces self-discipline), using the panopticon as a metaphor. Modern punishment and control increasingly work through surveillance, CCTV and digital monitoring, linking crime directly to the digital social world. The central debate is how far the media and globalisation cause crime as opposed to shaping the reaction to it.

Examples in context

A top essay weighs the amplifying role of the media (moral panics, deviancy amplification) against the complexity of the relationship, applies examples, and judges, while drawing synoptic links to globalisation and surveillance.

Try this

Q1. Outline two types of crime associated with globalisation. [4 marks]

• What the marker wants. Two types (AO1, two marks each): transnational organised crime (such as trafficking or cybercrime), and green or state crime, each briefly developed.

Q2. Outline and explain two stages of a moral panic. [10 marks]

• Cue. Two developed points: the media exaggerating and labelling a group as folk devils, and the deviancy amplification spiral of more policing and more deviance (Cohen), each applied to an example.