Photo by Denis Oliveira on Unsplash

For decades, critical criminologists, zemiologists, and abolitionists have urged fellow scholars to resist uncritically reproducing the categories and logics of the current political order—particularly the narrow frame of what counts as “crime.” As Louk Hulsman (1986) famously argued, crime has no “ontological reality.”

It thus matters that we continue to center Nordic conferences and collegial exchanges around crime, because our thinking remains tethered to the current political order.

What if we instead gathered at NSFK conferences to ask: how do we prevent and reduce social harm?

While social harm, like crime, does not have an ontological reality and is contingent on cultural understandings, the crucial difference is this: the definition of crime is owned and policed by states, whereas the definition of social harm can remain in the hands of researchers, communities, and those most affected.

Social harm points us toward preventable forms of suffering that emerge from how social structures and relationships are organized (Pemberton, 2015). As Pemberton (2015) puts it, harm occurs when “human flourishing is compromised by the denial of social resources necessary to enable the exercise of life choices” (p. 3). Instead of chasing a final or fixed definition of harm, zemiologists such as Canning and Tombs (2021) invite us to begin with people’s lived experiences and then qualify and contextualize from there (p. 122).

This is the orientation I’ve followed in my doctoral research, which explores what we might learn about harm prevention by engaging with incarcerated women’s reflections on their many encounters with the penal welfare state. The institutions that are part of making up the state often rely on a harm-preventive or mitigating function—be it social benefits during unemployment, residential care for children in abusive homes, or addiction treatment programs while incarcerated. Each intervention addresses a specific condition it seeks to alter.

During my time at Jyderup Prison, I interviewed 19 incarcerated women and 8 staff members and co-hosted two writing workshops with author Maja Lee Langvad. Many women spoke about moments in their lives when they reached out for support—hoping for something that could help them cope, sustain, and flourish.

Through speculative methods—qualitatively exploring not only the women’s past and present lived experiences with the penal welfare state, but also what could have been—my aim has been to imagine alternative futures. Rather than asking how the penal welfare state can stop women from committing the illegal acts that led them to prison, I ask: how can we learn from incarcerated women’s experiences in order to do prevention better as a society?

Such interest centers futures where prevention is not focused solely on reducing individual “criminal acts”, but on addressing the structural conditions that produce or incite social harm, such as poverty, pollution, social divides, and harmful social norms.

In contributing to the 2025 conference on “new challenges for crime control and prevention”—and now through this blog post—I wanted not only to take up the invitation to share how my research contributes, but also to extend an invitation of my own.

What if, in the years ahead, we stopped gathering under the familiar banner of “crime” and instead asked: what does it mean to prevent and reduce social harm? How might this shift reshape the questions we ask, the methods we use, and the horizons of possible solutions we imagine?

By reorienting our focus, we might not only expand our academic independence and collective imagination, but also strengthen our contribution to the ongoing reconfigurations of society through offering new directions and possibilities.

Author biography 

Merethe Riggelsen Gjørding is completing her PhD on the Danish penal welfare state, exploring prevention through centering incarcerated women’s experiences. Drawing on zemiology, transformative justice, and abolitionism, she invites rethinking current practices to foster a preventive paradigm more attuned to reducing social harm.

meretherg@edu.au.dk
Employee profile: Merethe Riggelsen Gjørding – Aarhus Universitet

References

Canning, V., & Tombs, S. (2021). From social harm to zemiology: A critical introduction: Routledge.

Hulsman, L. H. (1986). Critical criminology and the concept of crime. Contemp. Crises, 10, 63.

Pemberton, S. A. (2015). Harmful societies: Understanding social harm: Policy Press.