Taking Invisible Crimes and Social Harms Seriously

Abstract

In 1999, Jupp et al. mapped the contours of what they termed invisible crime and victimisation and considered the commonalities associated with this range of acts, events and experiences. They suggested that there are seven interacting and overlapping features that help make harms or crimes more or less invisible. These features are no knowledge, no statistics, no theory, no research, no control, no politics and no panic! The purpose of the book, entitled Invisible Crimes, Their Victims and Their Regulation (Davies et al. 1999), was fourfold. First, to explain why it was possible for particular types of crime, harm and injustice that clearly incurred suffering and victimisation to remain hidden and neglected, and therefore unregulated and uncontrolled. Second, to explore the occurrence, nature and impact of these ‘invisible crimes’ by bringing together the work of scholars undertaking innovative and challenging research in this area. In doing so, the book focused on white- collar crime, workplace crime — including health and safety crimes, illicit drug use, fraud and cybercrimes, and to an extent the book also mapped out a research agenda for this area. A third ambition was to demonstrate that a criminology informed by feminist, radical and critical traditions should continually refresh and reassess its ambitions by refocusing the ‘criminological telescope’ beyond what is typically encountered within the mainstream with a view to inform and intervene in the name of social justice.