Any behaviour that does not conform to the social norms is said to be deviant. Such conducts include the formally enacted rules and informal violations. Examples include crime and rejection of people's way of life. Sociologists and criminologists are interested in the studies around the manner in which the norms are created, enforced together with how they transform over time. 'Norms' are the rules that guide the coexistence of members of a given society while deviance arises when people fail to conform to the norms. The norms are dynamic across cultures, for instance, deviant behaviour in a given community may not be considered so in another culture.
When deviance appears as a violation of a social norm, sociologists view it as any thought, action, feeling or conduct that is seen to violate the values. Groups or individuals may perform the activities, but the underlying principle is that it must be non-conformant to the definitions of good behaviours as considered by the members of a particular society. However, the deviation of specific types of practice from the values and norms of a given society must exceed an absolute limit of tolerance by the community for it to be considered entirely deviant.
Deviance
The movie “Catch me if You Can” is a creation out of a true story of a man by the name of Frank Abagnale Jr. who acts as the main character (Ebert n.p). In his teenage, the man is seen to be young, smart and charismatic. During the same time, the boy witnesses his parents separate leaving him undecided on whom to stay with between the mother and the father as he had grown loving the two of his parents. Frank decided to ran away from the home as he considered this to be the perfect way to be fair to both parents. How then would he have sustained himself given that he did not have any jobs, and he had left the parents? Frank solved by impersonating different people including a lawyer, doctor and a pilot in various positions to raise money for self-sustenance. At one point, he turns up for classes in a new school and finds up that a new substitute teacher is to come in; without delaying he exercises his impersonation skills by writing his name on the blackboard and asks the students to keep quiet and inform him about what chapters they are to cover.
Frank was able to raise a cumulative amount of up to six million dollars in various countries through forgery and impersonation. FBI agent Carl Hanratty was finally given the assignment to follow up the activities of the unknown criminal. Frank engage the FBI agent in a running battle until he is eventually arrested at the age of 19 years. After serving in jail for some time, he is recruited by the FBI to help in tracing the criminals of forgery. Frank is also the pioneer of the modern security measures that the checks used in payment to date have (Downes, Rock and McLaughlin 42).
In the movie, Abignale’s behaviour is associated with the trauma experienced in adolescence after the separation of the parents. The divorce was as a result of cheating of the mother, Paula. However, the connection between the impersonation and fraud that Frank adopted and the experiences at teenage is not very clear, and it is one that excites discussions about social deviance and crime with the context of societal norms. The movie also depicts the FBI agent Carl Hanratty as a character whose mission in life is to capture Abagnale. The agent has a comprehensive overview of the activities that Frank is involved in and in one of the scenes, he points a gun at the criminal in a motel room, and instead of the suspect surrendering, he pretends to be also on the lookout for the criminal in question as a secret service agent. The exciting part of the movie is that it depicts Frank as a criminal who does not seem to plan his acts well but takes advantage of opportunities that arise in his way.
Abignale at one point dates the daughter of the local districtattoney, and while on a dinner party with his to-be in-laws, he contradicts himself by stating that he works as both a lawyer and a doctor yet his age does not reveal the capacity to be the same (Ebert n.p). However, when confronted by the District Attorney to explain, he adopts a genius way of answering the question and tell that he passed the bar in California and practised for a year before trying out pediatrics. When he mentioned that he had graduated from the Barkley school of law, it happens coincidentally that father of the girl at the dinner table also passed through the same school and asked him about a legendary professor at the institution who used to walk around with a dog. Frank answers that “the dog died.”
In the movie, the issue of deviance and other ethical considerations are demonstrated in various scenes. For Frank to deviate the attention of the FBI officers who were looking for him ta the Airport, he decided to design a fraudulent recruiting to the local Universities (Ebert). He succeeded in this by using Panam Airline as the brand name to make the system appear legitimate. After hiring good-looking flight attendants, who then accompanies him to the Airport, the attention of the FBI officers is diverted to the women, making Frank bypass all of them without them recognising him. Frank’s recruitment though it deviated from the norms of the society, was so appealing to the extent that the Universities encouraged many women to try it out. On the other hand, the activities were fraudulent, and that portrayed it as negative since the criminal was able to find his way past the officers. Frank was able to achieve his objective, and the women that he had recruited got a free flight out of Miami. Since the movie fails to give a clear explanation of what happened to the ladies afterwards, one can only verify Panam to justify that the recruitment was legitimate (Robert 54). The movie reveals that Frank went back to the University the following day to establish a recruitment system, but this is a deal that demonstrates deviance in itself since such systems take typically up to a month to install.
One of the most important aspects of businesses is the company privacy (Downes, Rock and McLaughlin 83). The unreliability of the employees of the Companies made it easy for Frank to learn about the process of cashing checks and how to be a doctor. Indeed, Frank was able to determine the appearance of a legitimate 'check', the routing numbers and paper quality after compromising the bank teller. In a different episode, he learned about the hospital by charming a female nurse. All these instances demonstrate how the company private may be jeopardised. It was also difficult to punish the nurses because not all of them knew about the exchange of information. The issues could have been resolved by vindicating the employees who had been involved with the frauds. On one side, Frank realised success in his endeavours of fraud as a result of a lapse in the values and traits of the employees. The women that Frank tried to convince would have remained adamant about their jobs and not deliver any information regarding the operations of the company.
Power and exploitation is another socio-ethical issue that is depicted in the movie. Money may assign authority to particular individuals over other average counterparts (Downes, Rock and McLaughlin). In the film, Frank received recognition of smiles and second looks from both children and people around him when he wore the uniform of a pilot. He used power and money to convince women to engage in unethical activities such as sex. Also, he used cash to market himself as a successful pilot although he was still too young. Frank succeeded in impersonating others and acquiring fraudulent checks, and no one made attempts to question his authority, making him take advantage of the circumstances. On the other side, the issue of power and exploitation has changed as people seem to have learned from such stories. Background checks that are used in the contemporary society make it more difficult for fraudsters to impersonate people of highest authority (Akers 51). Frank succeeded in everything that he had purposed to do by mimicking high authority managers. The fraud could have been avoided by asking for confirmation before issuing checks.
Theories
This section presents two approaches that are relevant to the concept of deviance as depicted in the movie.
Social Learning Theory
The theory emphasises the relationship between cognitive, behavioural and the situational determinant of social wellbeing (Akers 65). The social learning theory is applied in the study of crime and deviance to provide the understanding of the diversity in the criminal traits. The approach has its foundation on the idea that conformity to the cultural norms and deviance to the same follow a similar learning process. However, the difference is found in the direction of the balance influences on behaviour (Robert 31). In general, the SLT suggests that the likelihood of engaging in criminal acts will increase as the ability to conform to the norms decreases. The phenomenon will always hold when the people involved associate in a differential manner with others who already engage in the same activities.
One of the concepts upon which the social learning theory is embodied is the differential association whereby the idea is looked at from the behavioural-interaction perspective. According to the dimension in deviance is understood to be a product of association and interaction with people who are already immersed in the deviant behaviours (Downes, Rock and McLaughlin 102). The implication is that people in a given social context are exposed to different ways of defining acceptable and unacceptable values that may differentially enhance criminal or non-criminal engagement. The learning process may occur even through simple mechanisms like imitation provided that there is a social contact with the reference group (Young, Taylor and Walton).
General Strain Theory (GST)
The GST provides an extraordinary explanation of crime and delinquency (Robert 94). As opposed to the SL, the strain theory emphasises the adverse treatment by the other people and the role of emotions in the etiology of committing an offence. Straining or stressful situations bring negative emotions like anger and despair which in turn create pressure to behave in deviant ways in a given societal setting. GST was mainly formulated to explain the reasons why the levels of crime and delinquency differ from one person to the other irrespective of the social context. However, many scholars have tried to extend the theory to explain the patterns of crime as influenced by the socio-cultural factors like gender and social perceptions.
Analysis
The General Strain Theory (GST) fits the positivist mode since they agree to the perception that social forces may push members of a society who are obedient to the norms to commit a crime (Young, Taylor and Walton). In the case of Frank general stain theorists would have supported the behaviours seen in the movie based on the fact that he was forced into exile after the parents separated. The divorce between the parents could have invoked rage, anger and depression forcing him to get into the criminal activities as a way of making up for the lost social identity. The theory is different from the SLT in two ways: firstly, the manner in which social interactions lead to crime and secondly, the motivation to engage in delinquency.
On the other hand, SLT explains as to what motivate people to engage in crime in the first instance, why they continue offending others, and what may make an individual stop participating in such activities. According to the SL theorists, Frank could have started engaging in impersonation acts because he had seen the same happen within his social environment. In general, the two theories explain what may lead to deviance; with the GST focusing on the negative relationships while SLT is basing its assertions on the social interactions.
Works Cited
Akers, Ronald. Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
Downes, David, Paul Elliott Rock and Eugene McLaughlin. Understanding deviance: a guide to the sociology of crime and rule-breaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Ebert, Roger. "Catch Me If You Can." 25 December 2002. Rogerebert.com.
5 August 2018 .
Robert, Franzese J. The Sociology of Deviance. Springfield: Charles C Thomas Publisher, 2015.
Young, Jock, Ian Taylor and Paul Walton. The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
