Component 3 Section B: defining crime and deviance, and the measurement of crime through official statistics, victim surveys and self-report studies, including the dark figure of crime and the social construction of crime statistics.

What this dot point is asking

OCR Component 3 Section B (Crime and deviance) begins with defining crime and deviance and measuring crime. You need the three sources (official statistics, victim surveys, self-report studies), the concept of the dark figure of crime, and the interpretivist argument that crime statistics are socially constructed. This underpins every later theory, because how we measure crime shapes what we think causes it.

The answer

Defining crime and deviance

The three sources of crime data

• Official statistics are compiled from crimes recorded by the police and dealt with by the courts. They are cheap, cover the whole country, and show trends and basic patterns (by age, gender, area), but they capture only reported and recorded crime.
• Victim surveys, such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), ask a large sample about their experience of victimisation, whether or not it was reported. They reveal more crime than the police figures but rely on memory and honesty and exclude some groups (the homeless) and offences (corporate crime).
• Self-report studies ask people, often anonymously, what offences they have committed. They uncover hidden offending and show crime is more widespread than police data suggest, but raise issues of truthfulness and sampling.

The dark figure and social construction

The dark figure of crime is the large amount of crime that never appears in official statistics. It exists because victims do not always report (seeing crimes as trivial, fearing reprisals or distrusting the police) and because the police use discretion and recording rules, so not all reported crime is recorded. Positivists treat statistics as social facts useful for finding patterns; interpretivists argue they are socially constructed by the decisions of victims, police and courts, telling us as much about the reaction to crime as about crime itself.

Examples in context

A top answer treats statistics as socially constructed, weighs official, victim and self-report data, and judges which gives the best picture, rather than trusting any single source.

Try this

Q1. Outline two sources of data on crime besides official statistics. [4 marks]

• What the marker wants. Two sources (AO1, two marks each): victim surveys (the CSEW), and self-report studies, each briefly explained.

Q2. Outline and explain two reasons why victims may not report crimes to the police. [10 marks]

• Cue. Two developed points: seeing the crime as too trivial or private (such as some domestic incidents), and fear of reprisals or distrust of the police, each applied to an example and linked to the dark figure of crime.