Workshop on: "Conceptualizing, Assessing, and Reducing Harm: Drawing Insight from Victims’ Experience, Policy Initiatives, and Varied Disciplines"

Harm has been recognized as a central concept in criminal law for more than two centuries (see, e.g., Beccaria, 1764). Correspondingly, harm reduction (prevention, mitigation, and remediation) has long constituted an objective of criminal policy (Greenfield & Paoli, 2022). Harm also features prominently in other branches of law, most notably torts (e.g., Coleman et al., 2015). Beyond legal scholarship, Sparrow (2008) suggests that harm reduction constitutes a primary aim of policy across numerous fields, including poverty alleviation, anti-discrimination, and pollution and disease control.

Hillyard et al. (2004) have gone further by proposing to replace the idea of “crime” with “social harm” and founding a new discipline, zemiology, to study it (e.g., Canning & Tombs, 2021). Whereas liberal legal theories—e.g., Mill’s “Harm Principle”—and victimology have focused on harms to individuals, contemporary scholars and lawmakers increasingly recognize harms inflicted on collective stakeholders, the physical environment, and non-human animals, central to the field of green criminology (e.g., White, 2003).

Yet despite its far-ranging relevance to criminal and other policy, harm remains a contested concept (e.g., Lacey & Zedner, 2023). Theorizing and research are fragmented across diverse disciplines, suggesting both incoherence and untapped creative potential. Tools for systematically and empirically assessing harms remain scarce as do applications (e.g., Greenfield & Paoli, 2022).

Thus, the workshop has two primary aims:

1. To critically appraise and refine existing conceptualizations and methods of assessing harm, including the role of standing (i.e., who and what “counts”) in conceptualization and victims’ experiences in assessments.
2. To investigate and compare the extent to which harm-reduction initiatives are being pursued in criminal policy and adjacent fields.

By bringing together theoretical, empirical and experiential insights from multiple disciplines (e.g., criminology and its subfields, law, economics, psychology, epidemiology) and professional channels (e.g., criminal justice, mediation, and victims’ assistance), the workshop seeks to make a novel contribution to socio-legal studies.

Reflecting its aims, the workshop will consist of four sessions, each concluding with a roundtable discussion led by one of the organizers serving as discussant/moderator and participants with different disciplinary perspectives:

i.    Harm conceptualizations
ii.    Harm assessments
iii.    Initiatives to reduce harm across criminal and other policy domains
iv.    Implications for socio-legal studies

The workshop will produce a special issue in a prominent academic journal or a stand-alone volume.