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Abstract

This article analyses the comparability of the definitions of offenses used in the scientific literature and in comparative criminology research —which have their origin in the AngloSaxon tradition of common law— with those used in the Spanish Criminal Code (SCC), which inscribes itself in the tradition of civil law. The analysis shows that the English criminological definition of some offenses included in the European Sourcebook do not have a direct equivalent in the SCC, and vice versa. The main differences come from the classification and definition of property offenses in the SCC, which is the same used in several Latin American criminal codes. In particular, the Spanish legal concepts of fuerza and violencia are not synonymous with the English terms force and violence, which entails incompatibilities with concepts such as theft and burglary, and affects the distinction between crimes against persons and crimes against property (e.g., in the SCC, robbery is a crime against property instead of against persons). Some of these divergences have a direct impact on international comparisons of crime rates and may have gone unnoticed in many of the translations of English texts used in Criminology teaching.