The Classification of Crime

The final section of the ‘Settlement’ topic is the ‘Geography of Crime’. According to the English dictionary, a crime is an act prohibited and punished by law, or a collection of unlawful acts. Whenever a crime happens it has a time, location and a reason, hence Geography is important when studying crime as it helps understand any patterns. By understanding the patterns to crime it is possible to see where crimes are most likely to be committed in the future. As such, it is possible to combat crime with more policing in high risk areas, adapting old buildings to be crime-proof and designing new estates in ways which reduce crime.

Crime is classified into one of the following categories: crime against the person, sexual offence, robbery, burglary, offence against vehicles, other theft, fraud or forgery, criminal damage, drug offences, or ‘other’ - for anything which doesn’t fit into the previous categories. Crime does not only happen on a local or national scale, it can also happen on an international scale.

This topic in teaching…

This would be a really good discussion topic - asking students to discuss what they think the definition of a crime is and getting the students to feedback to the group. There are a lot of news articles on the BBC, or other news websites, which could be used as resources. After explaining the different types of crimes, students could be given a news article per pair and have to work out which type of classification of crime the news article is relating to. These news articles could either be discussed as a group after the students have decided on what their article is referring to, or students could swap articles until each pair has discussed 5 or 6 different articles.

References

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks3/geography/spaces/crime/revision/1/

Crozier et al (eds), 2008. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: HarperCollins.

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/the-geography-of-crime-6141222/