SOC205H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Zoophilia, Compurgation, Early Modern Europe
Document Summary
The main question being why do people commit crime? . Sutherland: criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. Theory: they"re analytical tools for understanding, explaining, and making predictions about a given subject matter. They have an idea about a relationship between variables. We use theories to help us organize information and narrow down all of the information into the most important aspects. Criminological theory helps us explain the problem of crime, how we should study and solve crime, and it challenges our current thoughts on crime. It moves us beyond representations on tv and looks deeper. Theories are not neutral and norm/bias-free, perfectly accurate, timeless statements of human behaviour. Theory changes over time and reflect the social context of their time, people are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc and this also reflects their theories and understandings. Over time we are interested in different things and it will also shape how we examine different phenomena.
