ABSTRACT
Crime is generally understood to be behaviour that is prohibited by criminal law. In other words, no act can be considered a crime, irrespective of how immoral or damaging it may be, unless it has been made criminal by state legislation. This conceptualization appears straightforward enough. However, it tells us very little about the processes whereby certain harmful acts and victims routinely come to be identified and recognized as part of the crime problem while others remain hidden.A critical approach to the study of crime and its impact on individuals and society therefore requires us to reflect on questions such as:What is ‘criminal’? How do legal conceptions of ‘crime’ and its victims come to be constructed?
