Towards a Cultural Criminology of Vandalism and Anti-Social Behaviour

Abstract

All of us will have broken something on many occasions in our lives — it could be in a domestic context like a plate or a vase. It could be in a social context, like a glass. Accidental damage aside, evidence suggests that at some point or other in our lives, many of us will have also wilfully broken something. It is the shift from the former as in the ‘accident’ to the latter in terms of intentionality, which signifies what we term ‘vandalism’ in our culture. We begin this chapter by asking what this term actually means and by tracing where it actually comes from.