The word "criminal means different things to different people, and it is difficult to characterize just where to draw the line between "real criminals" who commit theft or murder, for example, and ordinary people who do things that are against the law but much more minor, such as breaking the speed limit or making an illegal copy of a software program. In effect, in one sense, virtually everyone is a criminal in the literal sense, so criminality can be thought of as a continuum where the "real criminals" are at the high end of the scale and everyone else is in the middle or at the low end. Crime is a legal concept that is founded on political processes, but these differ from one place to another. It is helpful to think of crime from two perspectives the moving target perspective and the stationary core perspective. The moving target perspective takes the position that acts that are criminal in a particular country, state, or time period are not criminal in another. Men marrying girls under 14 is statutory rape in most Western countries but is an accepted and legal custom among the Muslims, for example. Laws against abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia have been superseded in many locales by new laws that permit these practices. There are, however, some acts that are all but universally criminalized, such as killing or injuring members of one's own society. There is little overlap in what each society defines as a crime.
The stationary core perspective asserts that
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= 923
= 4 (250 words per page)
