Criminologist Professor Fiona Brookman explores the different ways in which corporations kill us and why, despite these vast and deadly harms, corporate homicide is not considered to be ‘real crime’.

Find out more: southwales.ac.uk/research

Hello, I’m Professor Fiona Brookman, a criminologist at the University of South Wales.  My research focuses on violence and homicide and this Podcast considers corporate homicide.

Corporate homicide refers to illegal acts or omissions within a corporation that result in death.  It causes more deaths worldwide than any other single category of homicide.  To give a sense of this scale - the number of people who die from air pollution in the UK is at least 30 times higher than those who are killed in what we conventionally think of as a homicide.

But corporate homicide comes in many more guises.  For example, we can die by consuming food, water or medication that is harmful (for example e-coli deaths) or as a result of receiving contaminated blood (such as the HIV infected blood scandal), or as the result of travelling on deadly transport (remember, for example, the two fatal Boeing MAX 8 aircraft crashes), or in ‘accidents’, or through exposure to noxious chemicals (such as asbestos) in work. Alternatively, we may be killed due to exposure to contaminated land or when the building that we live in is ravaged by fire due to ineffective construction, such as the Grenfell Tower fire.

Despite the deaths caused by corporations, corporate crime is generally not considered to be ‘real’ crime.  It attracts little attention from politicians, is poorly regulated and often only derisory punishments are meted out when corporations are fully investigated.  Why is this?  In some cases, the harmful activates of corporations fall beyond the law – they are, what criminologist Nikos Passas (2005) calls, “lawful but awful”.  In other cases, governments have vested interests in the success of the company and so fail to adequately control their harmful activities.

Whatever the reasons for this neglect, as I unpick its scale and consequences, I have to conclude that tackling the deadly harms caused by corporations, is amongst our greatest challenges.