Terms and Concepts Paper
Due September 29, 2009
All Crime is not Deviance and all Deviance is not Crime
In my years growing up has been a whirlwind of events and fast growing to adulthood. I believe that all crime is not deviance and all deviance is not crime.. At a young age I wanted to get a move on with life I wanted to be an adult therefore I was employed with a fulltime job at fifteen years old, while still attending school fulltime. I took it a step further and was emancipated then married at fifteen years old to a man a few years older then me. Was this deviance to my family yes because I wanted to be an adult not a child? Was it a crime could have been but I believe taking the proper steps to adulthood it keep it at a level of deviance that was not a crime. In the theories of sociology it would probably be listed under the strain theory as rebellion. It would also fall under the same theory as ritualism. Then on to the other categories it would also fall under the Symbolic interaction of Cultural transmission and differential association. The rebellion rejects the goals and means of society and replaces them with new goals and means. As a rebel would reject the live or situation they are living in a replace it with another, such as I did substituting childhood for adulthood, student to wife, teenager to mother. The rebellion part is changing my childhood status and emancipating thru the courts to become an adult legally whether my parents agreed or not with the fast paced growing lifestyle I was trying to achieve. This would be considered deviance to my parents and not a crime. The ritualism part of the socialism aspect would be I had no interest in the conventional goals of childhood and society of a child, so I went through the prescribed rules and behaviors needed to change that in becoming a legal adult to change my status. It was an adaption to structural strain within