Crime In Canada

In Canada, children under the age of 16 are required to go to school and are restricted when it involves employment, only being able to work so many hours a week and being paid at least minimum wage. The Canadian government believes education should come first and has determined child labour illegal. While in other countries, such as Pakistan, although child labour is deemed illegal there are still many child who have been denied an education and are forced to work long hard hours with little to no pay in unsafe environments. Why is it that one country can take action while another turns a blind eye on certain crimes? What is consider a criminal act in one country can vary from another, some can be as extreme as it being legal to assault a
Linden (2016) stated, “A crime is an act that violates the criminal law and is punishable with a jail term, a fine, and/or some other sanction” (p. 14). This definition is very basic and straight forward, it can provided one with a grasp of what crime is but some criminologists feel it is not detail enough. A criminologist named John Hagen developed his own definition of crime, according to SOC 2510 Instructor Russell C. Smandych’s lecture slides (2016), Hagen argued: crime encompasses acts, waging break criminal law, as well as behaviours that for all practical purposes may be treated as crime. Linden (2016) pointed out that Hagen also felt that a good definition of crime must consider behaviours that are both actually and potentially liable to crime (p.15). To further his views on crime Hagan developed a continuum of crime. This continuum is from most serious to least serious crimes. There are three dimension that accessed the seriousness of a crime, the dimensions following: the degree of consensus that the an act is wrong, the severity of Society’s response to the act and the amount of harm caused by an act (Linden, 2016, p. 15-16). To provide a deeper understanding of these three dimension; lets consider the example of a mass murder vs. gay marriage. Most people will feel mass murder is very wrong, there is a serve response from society and a great amount of harm caused. On the other hand
This is why there are different laws in different countries, like the ones mentioned previously. Linden (2016) furthers this point by expressing “an act is only deviant from the point of view of a set of rules and regulations” (p.17). Due to society crime is also changing, it is relative to to time and place (Smandych’s lecture slides, 2016). For example, marijuana is illegal but with more research being made it has been legalized in many places. Society also views crime in the sense of extremes, such as intentionally shooting someone compared to accidentally running over a person with a vehicle. Both are murder but are treated on different levels of extremeness. Society has created a system for how the same crime is treated due to the circumstances. As Society progresses, new theories and ideas are presented. There are issues that are very relevant today but were never consider one hundred years