Social harm and crime at a global level

Poverty kills, yet rarely seems to provoke the political and public outrage that conventional `crime' often does. In this What is crime? briefing Social harm and crime at a global level we publish an edited transcript of a lecture given by Dr David Roberts at King's College London in April 2009.

Recently UNICEF, the international children's fund, pointed out that Britain had the highest rate of child poverty in all of Europe, and yet that is not prioritised as a matter for government policy, whereas issues like muggings and shootings are. Nearly 29 million people die from communicable diseases compared to the 141,000 who die in combat. And yet terrorism and war are prioritised in terms of what states concentrate their resources on.