[0:43]Deviance, that which departs from society's norms, whether by choice, by circumstance or by design. All of us violate the norms at one time or another. How we define deviance can vary over time and from one society to another. Societies enforce their version of accepted norms through social controls, both formal and informal. Deviance can bring about social change, but it also results in major social problems like crime.
[1:48]Deviance is any act, attribute or belief that violates the cultural norm and elicits from others a positive or negative reaction. Deviance is what people define as in any given group.
[2:14]They don't necessarily agree that an act is bad, they just recognize that society judges.
[3:03]So how do we define deviance? Because our attitude toward swimwear in the early 1900s, wearing a swimming suit that revealed much more than face, hands and feet would have been deviance. Today, attitudes have changed. Regardless of what society deems normal, some people will choose to defy those norms. In other cases, deviance is not a matter.
[4:39]If you live in a small town, in one way to get you to conform to normality in that town is to gossip about that person or the fear of gossip would make you conform. When laws are broken, society.
[5:17]Formal social controls would be those kinds of official punishments to get people to stop doing what they're doing. The degradation ceremony is another type of social control that has historically taken a number of forms.
[6:21]And finally, deviance, a constant presence in our changing world.
[6:42]But for some people today, tattoos have become fashion statements.
[7:18]The early theories of deviance were influenced by the belief that the roots of criminal behavior were biological. Today, sociologists use sociological perspectives to explore criminal deviance and its many causes, including socialization, cultural conflict, and the failure of social structures.
[7:42]According to the functionalist perspective, criminal deviance results from the failure of social structures to function properly.
[8:25]Essentially, functions believe that breaking the norm, people get to see what the act.
[9:12]For instance, Stephen Biko, in South Africa, was labeled a criminal because of his work against apartheid, and he was imprisoned for this this behavior and actually died in prison. But he became a hero to black South Africans.
[9:48]According to the conflict perspective, criminal deviance is caused by cultural and class conflict, and the law is used to maintain the power and privilege of the few over the many. Conflict theorists began their work on criminal behavior with the assumption that a person's place in the social hierarchy affects their.
[10:19]And their chances of being arrested.
[10:23]They see those people sometimes as being victims of a social structure that has caused them to be.
[27:18]In the end, there is no absolute definition of deviance, for it is society's reaction to an act, not the act itself, that defines deviance.
