Crime and Social Harm: Working Together on Life’s Wicked ‘Problems'

This special issue brings together new interdisciplinary analyses of the painful impacts of criminalisation, social harm and inequalities in a time of global poly-crisis and ‘super-wicked problems’. Our ideas and framing of criminality, justice and harm permeate, and reflect, the societies we live in, and (re)produce systems and structures that reveal how the ‘problem’ is represented. Criminal Justice Systems (CJS) now operate in contexts of persistent austerity; pluralisation of populations; increasing social awareness of structural inequalities; and polarised positions that often individualise or contextualise crime and criminality. This global context amplifies social harm. In this introduction to our special issue we discuss ‘crime’ and ‘harm’ as representations of complex, inter-related wicked ‘problems’, and we reflect on the disciplinary divergence this has prompted between Criminology and Zemiology, and in doing so we pause and think about ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ (Bacchi, 2025). We recognise and appreciate the full messiness of social reality and the need for ‘intelligently imperfect’ responses to life’s wicked ‘problems’ (Bannink and Trommel, 2019). We bring the focus back to social harm to try and see social ‘problems’ differently and to advocate for a more collaborative approach across all stakeholders in how we improvise solutions.