Health and Safety Crimes: (In)visibility and the Problems of ‘Knowing’

Abstract

In 1983, Steven Box described a ‘collective ignorance’ regarding the extent and nature of corporate crime (Box, 1983: 16). Since then, whilst some varieties of corporate crime have undoubtedly been hoisted onto social, political and legal agendas, most notably some forms of ‘economic’ crimes, the category of corporate crime upon which this chapter focuses — health and safety crimes by employers resulting in occupational deaths — remains largely absent from such agendas. The chapter begins with an attempt to determine the numbers of occupationally caused deaths, and the numbers of these deaths associated with crimes by employers. Each of these tasks is beset by enormous difficulties, yet it is still safe to conclude that the scale of unlawful workplace deaths vastly outweighs the numbers of recorded homicides. This blunt conclusion prompts a series of considerations, which form the second, and main part of the chapter, which examines why there remains little or no recognition of the scale of safety crimes. Here, the chapter addresses a number of mechanisms through which the discourses of law and order, and the collective ignorance regarding corporate crime in general, and safety and health crimes in particular, are created and maintained, namely: ideologies of business; media representations of crime, law and order; the nature of victimisation; causal complexity; official forms of data classification; methodological problems; and, finally, the organisation and objects of inquiry of academic disciplines.