Introduction

Social harm has emerged as a profitable avenue for social science research (Hillyard and Tombs, 2004, 2007; Davies et al, 2014; Hall, 2015; Pemberton, 2016; Smith and Raymen, 2016). Harm perspectives arose from the limitations and frustrations of a discipline wedded to a conceptual framework, ‘crime’ and transgressions of criminal law that failed to recognise wider ‘harms’ within late capitalist society (Tombs and Hillyard, 2004). This chapter will outline the key developments within the social harm perspective. The development of an analytical lens that is able to traverse the boundaries of legality and illegality within the context of structural or systemic forces is crucial for social science. A question emerges about an ontological or philosophical platform for social harm (see Hall, 2012a) and some existing approaches do grapple with this. While Pemberton's (2007, 2016) needs-based perspective and Yar's (2012) quest for recognition have ploughed this particular furrow, this chapter will offer an ultra-realist foundation (Winlow and Hall, 2016). If social harm presents an opportunity to identify the continuum of legal and illegal practice within the context of systemic forces of capital, ultra-realism provides analysis of subjectivity, ideology and causation that can underpin a social harm perspective. This chapter attempts to synthesise the core components of ultra-realism – the transcendental materialist subject, the causative absence, and the relationship between capitalism's depth structures and the subjective motivation to act – with social harm theory and its concern with the legal and illegal systemic harms of capitalism.

Social harm: traversing the legal and illegal

Social harm invites the extension of the criminological gaze beyond the horizon of legality (Hillyard and Tombs, 2004; Pemberton, 2016). While debate continues between social harm as an extension of the criminological discipline and zemiology as an independent study of social harm (see Copson, 2016; Hillyard and Tombs, 2017), the concept of harm infuses key topics including environmental damage (White and Heckenberg, 2014; Hall, 2015), workplace safety (Tombs and Whyte, 2007), leisure (Smith and Raymen, 2016) and poverty (Gordon, 2004). The limitations of crime as a conceptual category raise questions about the ability to place criminal activity and state responses in a wider context (Copson, 2013).