Social crime
Social crime (ger .: social crime ) refers to the abuse of state welfare or social services, analogous to white-collar crime , insofar as these the tax or subsidy abuse includes. Social crime is a phenomenon that occurs in all industrialized countries and is linked to the existence of complex state welfare services. There is a parallel here to white-collar crime, which is also increasingly occurring in industrialized countries.
Social crime includes:
- Undeclared work with simultaneous receipt of social benefits
- Housing benefit fraud
- Welfare abuse
- Health Insurance Benefits Fraud
- Pension fraud
- hidden overtime with short-time allowance
- Offenses in connection with Hartz IV (only in Germany)
The economic damage caused by social crime is immense. As is the case with white-collar crime, violations of social benefits laws are not viewed by sections of society as criminal behavior, so that they are often used as legitimate means of increasing income. Society treats them like trivial offenses , although economic and social crime together do more harm than "normal crime".
Sociological theoretical approaches
The term was coined by the sociologist Werner Bruns in 1993, who falls back on theories of deviant behavior for the theoretical justification, in particular on the criminal sociologist Edwin H. Sutherland and generally on Robert K. Merton . Bruns leads the social crime u. a. - based on the anomie theory of Émile Durkheim and Robert K. Merton - back to the weakening of collective consciousness in society. Individuals no longer feel responsible to the whole (community / society), but primarily to their private well-being. The sociologist also sees this as the reasons for the rise in white-collar crime.
Hypotheses
Bruns bases the following hypotheses:
- When, in a society, a highly complex division of labor weakens collective consciousness, solidarity with the whole, and
- when responsibility for others, solidarity with others, diligence, career and achievement have sunk in the hierarchy of values and are supplanted by others such as leisure, enjoyment and sociability, and
- when there is a discrepancy between the cultural and the social structure in a society, and
- if illegitimate means (fraud) to achieve a social goal (prosperity) are preferred to legitimate means (gainful employment), and
- when certain groups of people in a society have learned criminal behavior through interactions with other people in a communication process (manipulation of applications for welfare benefits), and
- if, while learning criminal behavior, these groups have also learned the techniques for carrying out the crime as well as the necessary direction of motives and rationalizations (e.g. no awareness of wrongdoing) and attitudes,
then social crime occurs.
Sanctions
Relevant legal norms for social crime are - as for white-collar crime - in the penal code , which results in some of the sanction options.
literature
- Bruns, Werner: Social Crime in Germany , Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1993
- Der Spiegel : Social welfare for Napoleon , 1993, issue 12.
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