Written by Professor Christina Pantazis
The University of Bristol has been home to critical and activist scholarship on social harms and crime from the mid-1970s. Our research has often focused on the invisible or hidden harms and injustices that traditional disciplines – including criminology – have ignored. Some of us use the term zemiology – borrowed from the Greek term ‘zemia’ (harm) – to deliberately mark out this new disciplinary territory.
The harms we research typically evade state-sanction or may even be state-sanctioned. They take place within:
- intimate or professional relationships;
- people’s homes;
- institutions (such as care homes for young people, schools, and prisons);
- organisations (like workplaces and corporations);
- systems and regimes (such as the welfare system);
- in the context of war, displacement and migration; and
- online, or virtual spaces (and technology more broadly).
Early research focused on state violence through the enactment of the law. Paddy Hillyard’s ‘The Suspect Community’ – a highly influential book – documented how emergency laws to deal with Irish political violence turned anyone connected with the Irish community into terrorist suspects through mass stop and search policing. Paddy’s work highlighted how supposedly temporary powers to deal with exceptional situations affectively became de facto permanent and normalised.
Gender-based violence pioneers – the late Ellen Malos and Gill Hague – who were subsequently joined by Marriane Hester – undertook important new research exposing violence within the home and how the continuing lack of interest by the police, who considered domestic violence as a private dispute, meant that victims were left unprotected. Their work exposed the serious gaps in legislation, policy and service provision – so much so that the basement in Ellen’s home became Bristol’s first refuge for women fleeing domestic violence.
My own research during this early period centred on the selective focus of the criminal justice system – punishing the harms of the most marginalised people in society for relatively minor infractions such as television licence evasion, sex work, homelessness and street begging.
By the late 1990s our work begun to have international resonance with academics from Europe – especially through the European Group for the Study of Social Control and Deviance where in 1998 – at one of its annual conferences – the Greek word zemia was first used to capture these kinds of social harm.
The following year in 1999, we organised the Dartington Conference – entitled Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously – which brought together academics from different disciplines – criminology, geography, politics, and economics, amongst others – to discuss the most serious harms to people and the environment and whether a new disciplinary area – zemiology – could be forged. Many of the presentations at the conference were subsequently included in the edited collection ‘Beyond Criminology’ published in 2004, involving Steve Tombs, Dave Gordon, myself, and Paddy as editors.
Fast forward to today, the School for Policy Studies represents a much larger intellectual hub of academics and doctoral students researching social harms and crime. We continue to research across a number of broad areas but we are united in our emphasis on producing rigorous evidence-based research which:
- documents social harms and how they manifest themselves in local, national and global contexts;
- exposes the injustice, inequalities and discrimination associated with different harms;
- provides policy-practice-based interventions with the aim of promoting social justice.