Chapter 5: Deviance

1. Deviance refers to the recognized violation of cultural norms. One familiar type of deviance is crime, or the violation of norms a society formally enacts into criminal law. Juvenile delinquency is the violation of legal standards by the young.

1. 4 Characteristics and Examples of Deviance

1. Deviance is universal, but there are no universal forms of deviance.
2. Deviance is a social definition; it is not an inherent characteristic. Deviance is not biological. No act is inherently deviant. Deviance is not a quality of the act; it is how we define it. It is not the act; it is how we label it.
3. Social groups make rules and enforce them. Rules are socially constructed, and social groups utilize social control mechanisms to ensure they are adhered to.
4. Deviance is contextual.

1. Medicalization of Deviance: the transformation of moral and legal issues into medical matters. Instead of seeing conformity and deviance as matters of "bad" and "good," we conceive the dichotomy as one of "well" versus "sick." Definitions of deviance have shifted "from badness to sickness."

1. Contemporary American Application: Culture of Victimization = Everyone is a victim of something, and no one is responsible for anything.

1. "The Blame Game" Film
2. Professional Meddling: Ranges from the offering of services or attention to

outright interference in other people’s lives. The meddler possesses the power to convert the usual into the unusual and the ordinary into the extraordinary. This allows the private realm of the meddlee to be viewed as a public arena susceptible to and often requiring meddlesome intervention.

1. DSM-IV: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (American Psychiatric Association). Note: Critics have referred to this as "The Encyclopedia of Insanity."