Social Harm

Social harm originates out of a series of debates within criminology about the narrowness of the definition of crime, that essentially, focuses on individual acts of harm, things like inter-personal violence, theft, so on and so forth. So the idea of social harm originally was to expand that notion of harm to encompass the harms that organisations and nation states cause. But latterly the idea of social harm really now transcends criminology so there are a group of writers who think that-and I would include myself there-that actually there's something to social harm that could be very useful in terms of trying to understand the harms that occur within society, to produce an objective and well-rounded analyses of harm.