Crime is overwhelmingly present in popular culture, which encompasses the ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images, and other phenomena within the mainstream of a given culture. Behaviors become crimes through a process of social construction. Popular culture reinforces the construction of crime by increasing public awareness certain criminal behavior and associating certain attitudes with crime. In Western culture, for example, sex crimes are perceived as particularly malicious offenses committed by sick and perhaps sociopathic individuals whose actions are inhuman and beyond redemption. The attitude towards individuals who have committed sex crimes, however, is the product of a socially constructed panic stimulated by media depictions. The
