Pemberton - Harmful Societies

HARMFUL SOCIETIES

Understanding social harm

Simon Pemberton

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

Policy Press University of Bristol 1-9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK Tel +44 (0)117 954 5940 e-mail pp-info@bristol.ac.uk www.policypress. co.uk

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Policy Press 2015

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ISBN 978-1-4473-2124-8
ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-2125-5 Kindle

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Harm reduction regime types

Allocation of nation states to harm reduction regime

Harm reduction indicators

Harm reduction regimes and harm reduction indicators: neoliberal, liberal and social democratic

Harm reduction regimes and harm reduction indicators: southern, post-socialist, northern and meso-corporatist

Harm indicators

Intentional killing by regime

Suicide by regime

Infant mortality rates by regime

Obesity by regime

Road traffic deaths by regime

Relative poverty by regime

Child poverty by regime

Financial insecurity by regime

Long working hours by regime

NEETS by regime

Social isolation by regime

Intentional killing/inequality

Intentional killing/social expenditure

Intentional killing/criminal justice spend

Intentional killing/imprisonment rates

Infant mortality/inequality

Infant mortality/social expenditure

Infant mortality/health expenditure

Relative poverty/social expenditure

Relative poverty/trade union density

Relative poverty/trust

Child poverty/child benefit

Child poverty/child services

Financial insecurity/trust

Financial insecurity/trade union density

Financial insecurity/social expenditure

Long working hours/trade union density

NEETS/trade union density

Social isolation/inequality

Simon Pemberton is a Birmingham Fellow jointly appointed to the Schools of Social Policy and Law at University of Birmingham, UK. He has researched and published widely in the areas of corporate and state harm, poverty and inequality, crime, social harm and criminalisation.

I have imagined this book for a long time, yet much of the thinking and analysis that has contributed to its ultimate conception owes a great deal to much valued friends and colleagues: Dave Gordon, Clare Hill, Paddy Hillyard, Christina Pantazis, Joe Sim, Eldin Fahmy, Dave Whyte, Karen Rowlingson and Stuart Connor. I am particularly grateful to Steve Tombs, for his detailed and thoughtful engagement with the typescript, which radically improved the initial draft, and to Policy Press, particularly Alison Shaw, for demonstrating considerable patience and an equal measure of faith when successive deadlines were not met. The analyses contained in this book owe a great deal to the patience and support of Sara Brookes. The usual disclaimers apply, of course. Sara, Finley and Freddy were the perfect inspiration to finish this project, and it could not have been done without their support and love.

Each year and worldwide, millions of adults and children are killed or experience death, and many more are hurt or injured, from causes that are entirely preventable. For example, the most recent estimates reveal that close to 7 million children under 5 years of age died from diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria or due to pre-birth or intrapartum complications;1 1.2 million people died on the worlds roads;2 there were almost half a million deaths as a result of intentional homicide across the world;3 and there were 378,000 global war deaths annually between 1985 and 1994.4

The general tendency of academic researchers has been to address the nature and causes of such harms, and their remedies, from within distinct and separate disciplines primarily, social epidemiology, social policy, criminology and development studies. The nature of academic disciplinary boundaries is such that interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary, approaches are rarely applied to the analyses of such harms.

The social harm approach, with its recent origins in the publication Beyond criminology: Taking harm seriously, by Paddy Hillyard and others in 2004,5sought to remedy this academic lacuna. Written as a critique of criminology, the authors sought to problematise the basis on which a distinct number of harms came to be seen as crimes and dealt with through an expensive, ineffective and ultimately socially harmful criminal justice system. At the same time they drew attention to other (potentially more harmful) events and situations that failed to attract the crime label, and therefore, the same level of social opprobrium. Their response was to call for a new social harm approach (or zemiological approach, taken from the Greek word