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Perspectives to explain offences as well as offenders of Bangladesh

There are three basic perspectives to define an offence: from the absolutist, the normative, and the reactive perspectives (Erich Goode, 1990). The absolutist perspective argues that the quality or characteristic of deviance resides in the very nature of an act itself. According to this perspective, it is an offender who commits an act, which goes against the order of the universe considering the moral majority of the universe. Murder is an example of the absolutist perspective toward deviance. Due to the matter of cultural relativity, the number of offences under this perspective is much fewer. While discussing about the relativity of norms, values, customs, cultures, etc. normative perspective comes forward. The normative perspective locates the quality of an offence not in the actions themselves but in the fact that they violate the norms of culture in which they take place. To the normative sociologist, deviance is the formal violation of the norms. Many activities considered as offence today may normalize with the advancement of time. This is a well-recognized perspective to define an offence within a given culture. But in many times, all offences do not make aware of it because of its non-visibility. For example, aberrant behaviors done by individuals are offences under normative perspective but it acquire less or no concern to general people. When an act gains reaction from the society, it comes to our concern. The present study identified only those offences, which were published in the newspapers. It denotes that these offences got societal reactions. So it is better to define an act using reactive perspective, the last perspective mentioned here. The reactive perspective argues that to qualify as offence, an act must (1) be observed or at least heard about and (2) generate concrete punishment or societal reaction for the perpetrator (Gibbs, 1972). The reaction may rise from general people, journalists, elite class, and from even law enforcing agencies like police, administration, court, etc. Many acts that are committed are not observed by others or never come to light in any way. These types of acts were not reported and consequently were not published in the newspapers. So in our present study only those acts were considered as offence, which violate the social norms and also achieve reaction from the society.