"Assess the view that deviance is merely a label applied by society to the acts of others".
Amy Brewerton Sociology - Crime and Deviance
“Assess the view that deviance is merely a label applied by society to the acts of others”
Interactionists consider that when examining deviance it is just as important to look at those who define the act as deviant as it is to look at the act itself. They would argue that it is the reaction of society that determines how deviant an act is, if at all.
Becker’s labelling theory suggests that deviance is actually created by the social groups which create and promote norms and values which are deviated from, rather than the act itself. He says that by applying these rules to outsiders and labelling them as deviant, deviance is created – therefore deviance is not created by the individual who carries out the act, it is created by the labels which are attached by others to that act. An example used to demonstrate this theory could be nudity – alone in a bathroom nudity it is accepted, but if a stranger walked in it would be considered deviant. However in nudist resorts nobody wears clothes and this is seen as accepted within the resort, but possibly deviant to those outside of the resort. How deviant the act of nudity is depends upon how it is interpreted by the social audience. Becker argues that this is how deviance is in fact created, because some acts can be deviant in some cases but not in others. However, it could be argued that changing the circumstances of an act (eg. being naked in a bathroom or being naked in the street) in fact changes the act itself – because being naked in the bathroom is not actually the same act as being naked in the street. It could therefore be argued that it in this circumstance it is actually the act itself which creates the deviance and that Becker is being too general about what constitutes the ‘same’ act.
