This chapter outlines the social harm ‘lens’ used in this book. Although the obvious point to start this task is with the existing literature on the topic, while this offers important pointers, it is disparate and fragmented in nature, and the concept of social harm that emerges is vague and ambiguous. A principal aim of this chapter, therefore, is to consolidate this work into a single historical account, and to garner a number of insights from this literature to assist with the development of the social harm lens.

Importantly, from this discussion, two dilemmas are identified in relation to establishing ‘social harm’ as an alternative lens. First, to provide the concept of social harm with a form that ensures it is distinct from other concepts, this requires conceptual boundaries that demarcate the phenomena that it exists to investigate. If these parameters are highly prescriptive, there is a possibility that the lens the concept offers is foreclosed and consequently fails to capture the full range of harms advocated by the approach. Yet if the conceptual boundaries remain too open, there is also the possibility that the concept becomes a ‘catch-all’, encompassing a host of activities that we might dislike or disapprove, yet are not necessarily harmful. Second, as the previous chapter argued, a more accurate ‘lens’ for the study of social harms is only possible if the concept is detached from dominant liberal frames. Thus, social harm as a concept must be located outside of the prevailing discourses of harm. However, in this process of detachment, locating the concept on the ‘outside’ of these discourses could lead to accusations that social harm is a ‘subjective’ notion, as it is not imbued with the legitimacy of dominant frames for which shared societal understanding exists. As suggested later in the chapter, this argument does not necessarily defeat the case for conceptual ‘detachment’, and neither should the social harm approach advocate a ‘value-free’ position as a means of compensation; it is important that the values that inform the constitution of the ‘alternative lens’ are laid bare, so that the empirical claims that are generated from it are open to critical scrutiny.