Rivista di Criminologia, Vittimologia e Sicurezza (Mar 2010)
Reti sociali per le politiche pubbliche tra processi di vittimizzazione e dimensioni della sicurezza comunitaria / Réseaux sociaux de politiques publiques entre processus de victimisation et sécurité communautaire / Social networks for public policies between victimization and community security
Abstract
From the point of view of the prevention of crime in the community, the “communitarian” character of the present-day society reveals an unceasing gap between social support and social control.If we agree on this idea we will be critically aware of the so-called breakdown of the welfare state given that welfare policies have been charged to hand crime over.Beyond that we can prove the vagueness of the (taken for granted) relationship among situational crime prevention – as well scrutinized in the light of the situational logic referred to the action setting – and conservative values, such as the deep-rooted reduction and reorganization of the public domain and the rise of the individual responsibility ethics. In this view crime-decreasing and social welfare-improving oriented standpoints have been harshly differentiated, though, as shown by the Nordic welfare states, the latter seems to be quite well-suited for the situational crime prevention.In this background the community undertakes the enhancement of the social provisions as a whole, so as to recover urban districts, support social interactions and escape from decay and social disease in unsafe neighbourhoods.Moreover we suggest scrutinizing the local social ties (or social bonds) which stand for informal social control resources, or community social control, dealing with the feasible mix of the social support and crime and social control paradigms we are all looking forward to. In this framework we will suitably link together and jointly examine some concepts and analytical tools like «social networks» and «social support» and, on the other side, «social capital», a belief which nowadays is deeply rooted into the social sciences.In this respect, according to Robert Putnam’s view, the overall suggestion is an inverse relationship between social capital and crime: the growth of the social capital levels would noticeably lessen the levels of the former, up to the point that the crime seems to be the main outcome of the social disease, therefore a lot of crime results in the weakening of the community’s social structure.We can put those statements that, at least in the short term, highlight in various ways an inversely proportionate relationship between social capital and crime side by side with another arguments, that will be reviewed here, about the increasing the risk of victimization that can be empirically observed where the social capital has been strengthening.
