Social Harm Working Group

Social harm is a framework that enables the exploration of social issues to move beyond legal definitions of ‘crime’ to include preventable harms caused by acts, omissions, processes and discourses by powerful elites, such as governments, political leaders, and corporations that are not necessarily illegal (Hillyard and Tombs, 2004; Pemberton, 2015). The social harm outlook recognises unfairness, injustice, inequality, and exclusion, and serves as a vehicle for advocating positive change.

These harms include, but are not limited to:

Austerity and social disinvestment policies – Government policies that reduce public funding for essential services like healthcare, education, and welfare programmes, disproportionately harming low-income communities and exacerbating poverty and social inequality.
Border-related harms – Policies and enforcement measures that negatively impact migrants and asylum seekers, including detention centres, family separations, deportations, and barriers to legal migration.
Environmental harms – Ecological damage caused by human activity, including air and water pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change.
Harms perpetuated by the leisure industry – Industries such as gambling, which, while promoted as entertainment, can lead to addiction, financial distress, and mental health issues.
Drugs and drug policies – The widespread social and health harms caused by substance abuse, as well as punitive drug policies that often criminalise addiction rather than addressing it as a public health issue.
Harms of coloniality – The enduring effects of colonialism, including economic exploitation, cultural erasure, political domination, and systemic inequalities.
Legal harms – The unintended or disproportionate negative consequences of laws and legal frameworks, such as mass incarceration, over-policing of marginalised communities, restrictions on civil liberties, and laws that prioritise corporate interests over human rights.
Workplace harms – Labour exploitation, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, precarious employment, and workplace discrimination.
Harms of criminalisation – The negative effects of criminalising certain social behaviours—such as poverty, homelessness, sex work, and drug use—leading to increased incarceration rates, police violence, and systemic marginalisation rather than addressing root causes. Digital harms – Risks associated with online platforms, such as TikTok particularly their impact on children and young people.
Harms of extreme wealth concentration – The disproportionate accumulation of wealth by billionaires, which exacerbates economic inequality, enables tax avoidance, increases corporate influence over politics,
and perpetuates labour exploitation and resource hoarding.
Harms caused by classicm, racism, sexism, ageism, disablism serving to discriminate, marginalise, disadvantage and exclude.

These phenomena demonstrate a mass scale of social harm that heightens inequalities and pervasive injustices against the backdrop of capitalist and neoliberal societies.

Aims of the group

Our Social Harm Working Group brings together scholars and activists committed to critically examining the broader dimensions of harm in society beyond the narrow confines of legal definitions of crime. Through similar research interests that cuts across social sciences disciplines, we examine how economic systems, commercial interests, and governmental policies, as well as social structures and processes relating to class, gender, race, among others, all contribute to pervasive harm that is mostly undetectable under conventional criminological and legal frameworks.

Our activities

Over the years, our Social Harm Working Group has played a major role in influencing conversations within and beyond Criminology (Hillyard et al, 2004) and how it connects to social justice movements over the years. The group will develop international collaborations with other groups and activists, and further integrating perspectives on harm within global movements for social and environmental justice.
We have also published special issues in the European Group journal, Justice, Power and Resistance, where members have foregrounded debates on social harm and structural violence.

Over the next three years, we will build upon our existing successes by:

1. Continuing to advance approaches of social harm that cuts across social sciences disciplines
2. Linking scholars with similar interests to advance the social harm approaches within their research areas and disciplines, both through research and teaching
3. Cultivating research impact that influences policy, political and social movements
4. Supporting early career researchers and doctoral students by providing them with platforms to discuss and disseminate their work, and connect with our network.

Join us

We very much welcome participation from academics, activists, practitioners, and students who wish to interrogate the broader structures of harm within society. Our Working Group is an open, collaborative space for anyone committed to challenging the inequalities, injustices, social divisions perpetuated by state, corporate actors and powerful actors/groups. We are guided by progressive values including equity,
inclusivity, integrity, transparency, care, and collegiality.

For more information on how to get involved, please get in touch with us:
Nasrul Ismail (Nasrul.Ismail@bristol.ac.uk)
Joanna Large (Jo.Large@bristol.ac.uk)
Hanna Malik (hanna.malik@utu.fi)
Christina Pantazis (C.Pantazis@bristol.ac.uk)