Children as Victims of Homicide: Making Claims, Formulating Categories, and Constructing Social Problems

• NCJ Number: 151494
• Journal: Deviant Behavior Volume: 15 Issue: 1 Dated: (January-March 1994) Pages: 63- 83
• Author(s): N P Unnithan
• Date Published: 1994
• Length: 21 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Earlier version of paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, 1990, Baltimore, Maryland

Annotation

The construction of a social problem involves two interrelated processes, making claims about a particular condition and typifying the problematic behavior in terms of related people or conditions; the author examines these two processes in the context of homicide cases where the victims are children.

Abstract

Both claims-making and typification have generally been unfocused in the past. Moreover, popular and academic research and organizational attention to child homicide have been minimal. These efforts have also been hampered by difficulties faced by social control agencies in defining, identifying, and reacting to child homicide. Such difficulties occur for three primary reasons: (1) child homicide perpetrators are often parents or guardians; (2) child homicide has varying patterns related to motivation, method, and cause of death and varying perpetrators associated with children's developmental stages; and (3) boundaries of the child homicide issue have been captured by a variety of claims-makers and typifiers who are primarily interested in promoting other social issues. The importance of medical, legal, and welfare responses to child homicide is discussed, and claims-making and typification activities are compared for child abuse and child homicide. 82 references and 1 table