Deviance in Our Society

Now a days we hear of many events that are taking place all over the world that involve stealing, abusing children and drunk driving. All of

these events are categorized as criminal deviance. One of the events that I consider to be occurring a lot, especially on popular television

shows is stalking underaged kids and abusing them. Pretty Little Liars is a popular television show that many teenagers watch. It's about a

group of 5 girl best friends that always hid secrets from one another until on of them was killed and many secrets began to be revealed. After

Allison's death the group of girls starting receiving messages form s person referred to as "A". These messages were sometimes threats and

other times just gossip about someone whom they cared about.

"The people of a community spend most of their lives in close contact with one another, sharing a common sphere of existence which makes them feel that they belong to a special "kind" and live in a special "place" (Heiner 8). In Pretty Little Liars the girls manage to keep "A" a secret for more than a year, I feel that this can be considered deviance because these girl did not say anything about what was going on, and their families did not realize that people were breaking into their houses. The group of girls were literally being harassed, "A" would sneak into their house, threatened to kill them and even harm their families. If I were in their situation the first thing I would do would be contacting the authorities and telling my parents, I mean, that's what I think any normal person would do.

Throughout the show other abnormal things happen. The detective that's in charge of Allison's murder turns out to be one of the suspects according to the girls; he even threatens one of the girls, Hannah, and her mother at one point. The reason why I believe that the detective being able to get away with what he does is deviance is because how does his colleagues not notice what he's up to? Why does Hannah and her mother not call the police right after the detective came to their house and warned them not to tell anyone about the evidence they found? Those are just some of the questions that I asked myself while watching this show, I don't really find the way any of the characters act to be normal, they keep everything as a secret when in reality it should be told to someone in order to be safe.

"For murderers to disappear, the horror of bloodshed must become greater in those social strata from which murderers are recruited; but, first it must become greater throughout the entire society" (Heiner 4), when I read this sentence the show made a lot more sense to me. Even though