A thought experiment.

Open the news this week. Which crimes did you see?

Most likely: a robbery, a drug operation, a fight, a murder. A pixelated suspect on screen. Police cordons. Grieving families.

Now ask this: How many major corporations caused environmental damage this week? How many employers injured or killed workers through safety violations? How many financial institutions systematically defrauded small investors?

Were any of those in your news feed?

Probably not. This is not a coincidence.

Crime Is Not a Reality — It Is a Selection

One of criminology's most unsettling findings is this: which actions get defined as "crime" and prosecuted, and which get dismissed as "industrial accident," "market risk," or "administrative error" — this process is not objective.

Definition is a product of power relations.

Howard Becker wrote in 1963: "Deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits, but rather a consequence of the application of rules and sanctions by others." Who makes the rules, who enforces them, and who is exempted from them — these are political questions.

Critical criminology asks precisely these questions: Whom does the criminal justice system protect? On whose behalf does it operate? What does it make visible — and what does it make invisible?

The Media's Crime Map: Whose Face Is on Screen?

Stanley Cohen's concept of moral panic, defined in 1972, has never been more relevant.

Certain groups — migrants, subcultures, youth communities, marginal identities — are systematically presented as threats in mainstream media. This representation is not accidental: it produces an exaggerated, dramatised narrative that aligns neatly with particular political discourses.

The result: the public begins to believe these groups are inherently "criminal." The criminal justice system applies more intensive surveillance toward them. And that surveillance generates more crime statistics — which appear to "confirm" the original prejudice.

This is a vicious cycle. It is a form of representational violence.

Invisible Crimes: White Collar, Green Collar, Corporate Harm

Critical criminology's most powerful contribution is its theorisation of "invisible crimes."

When Edwin Sutherland introduced the concept of white-collar crime into the literature in 1949, he shook the criminological world. The message was unambiguous: crime is not only committed on streets, in poor neighbourhoods, or among marginal groups. Crime is also produced within corporate practices, financial manipulations, and the interest networks built with regulatory authorities — and it largely goes unpunished.

Today, green-collar crime has been added to this picture: corporate practices that violate environmental legislation and cause ecological destruction. And the concept of social harm: actions that are legal yet deeply harmful — working conditions that produce precarity, deaths generated by subcontracting systems, displacement caused by urban renewal.

Why do these harms remain invisible?

Because they lack the definitional power to make themselves seen.

The Criminal Justice System: Neutral Referee or Structural Actor?

Mainstream criminology typically assumes the criminal justice system to be a neutral arbiter: crime is committed, the system responds, justice is served.

Critical criminology disputes this assumption.

How laws are written is a political process. Which institutions get regulated, which violations are defined as crimes, which penalties are set at which severity — these are not technical decisions. They are the product of particular interests gaining access to the legislative process.

Where police are deployed is a political choice. Intensive surveillance in poor neighbourhoods, minimal visibility in corporate office districts — this distribution directly shapes crime data.

Prosecution decisions follow discriminatory patterns. The same action is named differently, punished with different weights, or never prosecuted at all — depending on the social position of the perpetrator.

This system is not neutral. This system is a structural actor. And critical criminology never stops asking in whose interest that actor operates.

Readings from Türkiye: Criminalisation and Invisibility

The Turkish context offers particularly fertile ground for this analytical framework.

The criminalisation of migrant and refugee populations in public discourse; the legal and media invisibility of the structural harm experienced by communities displaced through urban transformation; the far weaker public imprint of occupational deaths compared to street crime — all of these are questions critical criminology is built to ask.

Who gets declared criminal? Whose harm becomes visible? Which forms of suffering are systematically ignored?

These questions are not yet at the centre of criminological debate in Türkiye. CultCrimNetwork exists to fill that gap.

Crime Is Not a Public Order Problem — It Is a Struggle Over Representation and Power

To discuss crime exclusively through the lens of street offences, individual deviance, and public order statistics is to participate in a narrative that renders power relations invisible.

As CultCrimNetwork, we contest that narrative.

Crime — what gets defined as crime, who gets declared criminal, which harms are made visible and which are rendered invisible — all of this is the terrain of struggles over representation and power. Criminology cannot look away from this struggle; it is obligated to make it visible.

Reading media discourse, legal definitions, and judicial practice through a critical eye is not an academic luxury. It is an analytical necessity.

CultCrimNetwork — Crime through the lens of Culture.

#CulturalCriminology #CultCrimNetwork #CriticalCriminology #MoralPanic #WhiteCollarCrime #Criminology

Which Crimes Do We "See" — and Which Are Made "Invisible"?