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Chapter 5. Deviance. Is it deviance?. Defining Deviance. Behavior that is recognized as violating expected rules and norms. Behavior that departs significantly from social expectations.
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Chapter 5 Deviance
Defining Deviance • Behavior that is recognized as violating expected rules and norms. • Behavior that departs significantly from social expectations.
Deviance is any behavior that violates social norms, and is usually of sufficient severity to warrant disapproval from the majority of society.
Deviance is nonconformity to a given set of norms that are accepted by a significant number of people in a community or group. It also refer to the violation of social norms. Deviance is a failure to conform with culturally reinforced norms. This definition can be interpreted in many different ways. Social norms are different in one culture as opposed to another. For example, a deviant act can be committed in one society or culture that breaks a social norm there, but may be considered normal for another culture and society. Some acts of deviance may be criminal acts, but also, according to the society or culture, deviance can be strictly breaking social norms that are intact.
The concept of deviance is complex because norms vary considerably across groups, times, and places. In other words, what one group may consider acceptable, another may consider deviant. For example, in some parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Muslim Africa, women are circumcised. Termed clitoridectomy and infibulation, this process involves cutting off the clitoris and/or sewing shut the labia — usually without any anesthesia.
In America, the thought of female circumcision, or female genital mutilation as it is known in the United States, is unthinkable; female genital mutilation, usually done in unsanitary conditions that often lead to infections, is done as a blatantly oppressive tactic to prevent women from having sexual pleasure.
Causes: Deviant behavior is caused by people with actual physical illness, malfunctions or deformities. People who exhibit socially disapproved behavior are considered the ills or diseases of the society.
Examples: Drug addiction, mental illness, prostitution and criminality.
Solutions: Education, re-education, hospitalization, rehabilitation, imprisonment, capital punishment.
Causes: Deviant behavior is a result of aberrant genetic traits in such cases as mental illness, criminality, and homosexuality. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist who studied the skulls and bodies of many prisoners, reported that there are “animalistic” physical patterns found in criminals, savages and ape; that people with enormous jaws, high cheekbones, and prominent superciliary arches – are born criminals. However, Lombroso’s theory was debunked by Charles Goring, a British physician, who found no physical differences between criminals and ordinary citizens.
Witkin (1976) found that prisoners with an XYY chromosome pattern or with an extra Y chromosome (a normal man has an XY chromosome pattern ) might predispose themselves to deviance. However, his was later debunked by Danish study. The researchers speculated that men with an extra Y chromosome are less intelligent and easier for the police to catch.
Solutions: Education, re-education, hospitalization, rehabilitation, imprisonment, capital punishment, and behavior modification.
Causes: Deviant behavior is brought about by deviant impulses toward sexuality and aggression. Failure to structure one’s behavior in an acceptable way, worries, tensions, frustrations, traumatic experiences, exposure to models of violent behavior; reinforcement for aggressive acts; and early commission of deviant acts are psychological causes that precipitate deviant behavior.
Solutions: Psychiatry, psychology counseling, hospitalization and rehabilitation, shock therapy
Causes: Society’s labeling on certain behaviors as deviant causes deviant behavior. Behaviors are labeled or tagged as proper or improper, moral or immoral, good or bad. Behaviors which transgress the social norms and values are labeled or socially defined as deviant; they are, in turn, sanctioned by ostracism and punishment. Behaviors which conform to the norms are given positive sanctions, such as rewards and commendations. Therefore, one would not be deviant unless detected and there is a particular kind of social reaction to it. Deviant levels tend to become self- fulfilling prophecies. One response to being labeled deviant is to embrace the role. People labeled as deviants undertake life patterns of the deviant culture labeled to them by others.
In sum, by labeling certain people deviant and shutting them out of conventional life, society virtually ensures the behavior it is trying to prevent.
Solutions: Relabeling and delabeling certain people as “ criminals,” “ prostitutes,” “ homosexuals,” “ schizophrenic,” etc. once considered as deviant.
Causes: The social structure plays a significant influence in the sense that it prompts people to engage in deviant behavior. Equilibrium exists when people who use the accepted means achieve socially approved goals and experience satisfaction. When the goals and the means are not in harmony, anomie or normlessness results. It can cause deviant behavior when people are denied access to accepted means to reach approved goals.
Durkheim introduced the concept of “anomie” as a conditions within society in which individuals find that the prevailing social norms are ill- defined, weak, or conflicting. For example, many people expect to have a job, but the economy may not provide enough jobs for everybody. Thus, a jobless job – seeker may resort to illegitimate or illegal means to achieve his goals.
Solutions: Giving access to approved goals, equal opportunity for all.
Causes: Conflicting values, vested interests, and scarce resources between conflicting individuals or groups cause deviant behavior.
Examples: Capitalists vs. workers; AFP vs. NPA; Christians vs. Muslims; political party vs. another.
Solutions: Equating or balancing the power between conflicting individuals or groups through collective bargaining (CBA); peace negotiations, truce ceasefire and sharing of power.
Causes: Deviant behavior is caused by an unjust social structure, a partisan social order where there is unequal distribution of wealth, power and prestige in the society. According to Marx, the social arrangements and legal order serve the interests of the ruling or governing class and are stacked against the poor, the marginalized and culturally disadvantaged members of the society. This creates conflict between social classes.
Solutions: The moderates propose more reforms in the various social institutions; the radicals advocate a sweeping transformation or a revolutionary approach, or overhaul of the existing unjust social structure in order to bring about a more or less equal distribution of wealth, power, and prestige in the new social order.
Causes: Deviance is created through the socialization or transmission of norms within a community or group. The standards people eventually adopt as their own are learned through differential association with others and supported by a sympathetic subculture, such as a radical subculture, a drug subculture or a homo-sexual subculture.
Solutions: Education, re-education, role models of successful people, hospitalization, rehabilitation, imprisonment, fines, censures, capital punishment.
Crime is any act which breaks the formal, written laws of a state.
Cross-cultural communication as deviance Cross-cultural communicationis a field of study that looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds endeavor to communicate. All cultures make use of nonverbal communication but its meaning varies across cultures. In one particular country, a non-verbal sign may stand for one thing, and mean something else in another culture or country. The relation of cross-cultural communication with deviance is that a sign may be offensive to one in one culture and mean something completely appropriate in another. This is an important field of study because as educators, business employees, or any other form of career that consists of communicating with ones from other cultures you; need to understand non-verbal signs and their meanings, so you avoid offensive conversation, or misleading conversation. Below is a list of non-verbal gestures that are appropriate in one country, and that would be considered deviant in another.
EXAMPLES OF CROSS-CULTURAL DEVIANCE • Asian-avoiding eye contact is considered polite • United States-when saying hello or talking to someone it is impolite to not look directly at the person. • Japan-the O.K. signal means that you are asking for money. • Canada-thumbs up-used for hitch hiking, or approving of something
Excellence is a form of deviance. If you perform beyond the norms, you will disrupt all the existing control systems. Those systems will then alter and begin to work to routinize your efforts. That is, the systems will adjust and try to make you normal. The way to achieve and maintain excellence is to deviate from the norms. You become excellent because you are doing things normal people do not want to do. You become excellent by choosing a path that is risky and painful, a path that is not appealing to others.
POLITICAL DEVIANCE. it means that it evolves around a certain community in which politics is involved.
SADOMASOCHISM: A Form Of Deviance Sadomasochism is a sexually deviant behavior that is practiced by many people within today’s society. It is the combination of two paraphilias, sadism and masochism, which are usually always linked together. An occasional mild or light form of sadomasochism (or S& M for short), is considerably common among the general population. Many people often enjoy being mildly dominant or submissive during lovemaking. They believe that it makes the experience more enjoyable. But when S&M becomes the dominating feature of a person’s sexuality, that is when he or she is considered deviant. Unlike other paraphilias, sadomasochism includes a large population of women as well as men. They are nearly equally balanced in number.
A paraphilia known as masochism is characterized by the desire or need to inflict pain and or humiliation, so that sexual arousal and fulfillment may be achieved. The term “masochism” refers to an Austrian historian and author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), who wrote various stories of male submissiveness. These stories consisted of men who received sexual pleasure by having their female partners inflict pain upon them (Ernulf&Innala, p635). A masochist may receive sexual gratification from several different types of pain and or humiliation. Some of these types may include being spanked, being whipped, being made to perform humiliating acts, being rudely insulted, being blindfolded, being disciplined, and being restrained (Rathus, Nevid, &Fichner-Rathus, p545). Being physically bound or restrained is most commonly called sexual bondage and it is a part of bondage and discipline, “where discipline refers to psychological restraining, such as control, training, and nonphysical punishment” (Ernulf&Innala, p637)
Religious deviance, though its accepted in the middle east and europe a little more, some people think we are over modest as Orthodox Jewish people. For example, most women do not wear a Tichel or a hair covering after marriage. Or most women do not dress (Most do not wear long skirts four inches below the knee or long sleeves unless its winter in some places).
Sexual deviance is a complex issue because conformity and deviance are relative terms. To complicate matters further the definition of the term sexual deviance has shifted over time. In the last two to three decades there has been a shift in our attitude towards accepting some of these behaviors as normal and acceptable.
