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Deviance

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Submitted By bigkeith1968
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Outline labelling theory and consider its usefulness in understanding youth crime and anti-social behaviour in Britain today.
Labelling theory claims that deviance and conformity results not so much from what people do but from how others respond to those actions, it highlights social responses to crime and deviance Macionis and Plummer, (2005).Deviant behaviour is therefore socially constructed. This essay will describe in full the labelling theory and comment on the importance of the theory to the deviant behaviour of the youth and the anti-social behaviour of the youth in Britain today.
The labelling theory becomes dominant in the early 1960s and the late 1970s when it was used as a sociological theory of crime influential in challenging orthodox positivity criminology. The key people to this theory were Becker and Lement.The foundations of this view of deviance are said to have been first established by Lement, (1951) and were subsequently developed by Becker, (1963).As a matter of fact the labelling theory has subsequently become a dominant paradigm in the explanation of devience.The symbolic interaction perspective was extremely active in the early foundations of the labelling theory. The labelling theory is constituted by the assumption that deviant behaviour is to be seen not simply as the violation of a norm but as any behaviour which is successfully defined or labelled as deviant. Deviance is not the act itself but the response others give to that act which means deviance is in the eyes of the beholder. Actually the labelling theory was built on Becker, (1963:9) statement that "Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitute deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders----deviance is not a quality of the act of a person commits, but rather a consequences of the application by

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