Invisible Crimes, Social Harms and the Radical Criminological Tradition

In writing this book our ambitions have been threefold. First, to examine contemporary criminological research and scholarship in an area that we have been broadly interested in for some 20 years — what we have elsewhere termed invisible crime (Davies et al. 1999). In putting together this volume, we are in no way suggesting that its contents should be seen as exhaustive of invisible crimes or social harms. Far from it. The examples discussed within the 12 chapters have been chosen to bring illustration of the range, type and nature of crimes and harms involved. In each case their ‘relative invisibility’ is exposed. A second ambition has been to examine whether the core ‘features of invisibility’ originally identified by Jupp et al. (1999) remain salient as an organising framework to explain why particular actions and or reactions remain hidden and neglected, despite their harmful impact on the lives of individuals and communities. Our third ambition has been to contribute in some small part to a progressive radical criminological tradition (Currie 2007, 2010; Hudson 2010; Matthews 2009, 2014; Scraton 2007; Taylor et al. [1973] 2013) intent on connecting action and reaction through the dynamic interplay between theory, empirical research and intervention (Matthews 2009), and working towards a better and more just society (Currie 2007).