Defining crime and deviance, the difference between the two, and the idea that deviance is socially constructed and varies by time, place and culture.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to define crime and deviance precisely, explain the difference between them and the way they overlap, and understand the central sociological claim that deviance is socially constructed, so what counts as deviant varies by time, place and culture. This is the foundation of the whole crime and deviance topic on Paper 2, and definition and explain items routinely test it.

Defining crime and deviance

The key sociological terms underneath these definitions are norms (the specific, unwritten rules about how to behave in a given situation) and values (the broad beliefs about what is right and important). A crime breaks a formal rule that the state has written into law and backs with formal sanctions such as fines or imprisonment. Deviance breaks an informal rule, and the sanction is informal disapproval such as a frown, gossip or being avoided. Sociologists are interested in deviance, not only crime, because most social control happens through norms, not laws.

The difference and the overlap

Crime and deviance overlap but are not identical, and the exam rewards students who can show all three relationships clearly:

• Both criminal and deviant. Murder breaks the law and almost every social norm, so it is both a crime and seriously deviant.
• Criminal but not very deviant. Minor speeding or downloading copyrighted music is illegal but so widely done that many people do not see it as deviant.
• Deviant but not criminal. Queue-jumping, picking your nose in public or talking to yourself loudly break norms and attract disapproval, but no law forbids them.

Mapping an act onto these three categories is a reliable way to show understanding in a short answer. It demonstrates that the law and the norms of a society do not perfectly coincide, which is exactly the point examiners want.

Deviance is socially constructed

The phrase "socially constructed" is the heart of this dot point. It means society builds the category of deviance through its norms, rather than discovering a fixed natural fact. Three pieces of evidence support this. Time: values change, so cannabis use, divorce, homosexuality and smoking in public have all shifted in how deviant they are seen to be over the last century. Place: alcohol is legal in Britain but banned in some countries, while behaviour acceptable on a beach would be deviant in an office. Culture: within one society, subcultures such as religious groups or youth groups hold different norms, so what one group treats as normal another treats as deviant. Because the judgement of deviance depends on who is watching, when and where, sociologists conclude it is constructed by society rather than fixed by the behaviour.

This idea connects forward to the interactionist labelling theory of Becker, who argued that deviance lies not in the act but in the social reaction to it. It also underpins why official crime statistics are partly a record of how society reacts to behaviour, not a neutral measure of how much wrongdoing occurs.