Criminalisation as Legal Translation

This theoretical preprint develops an account of criminalisation as legal translation. Its central argument is that broad empirical and normative harm fields do not become criminal liability automatically. They must be translated into narrower liability fields through legal categories, evidential standards, attribution rules, procedural pathways and institutional practices. The article introduces four linked concepts. A harm field is the broad domain in which injury, domination, vulnerability or suffering is identified. A liability field is the narrower set of acts, omissions, patterns or relations that can be made criminally attributable. The criminalisation surface is the processable zone opened when a harm category becomes available to criminal justice institutions but has not yet been sorted into liability or non-liability. Sorting burden refers to the procedural, epistemic and normative work required to move across that surface. The paper argues for mechanism-sensitive criminalisation: legal analysis should distinguish the existence of harm, the mechanism through which harm is produced, the appropriate unit of liability and the evidential pathway through which attribution can be made. Psychological violence and coercive control are used as a strategic illustration because they expose both the need for legal recognition and the difficulty of translating cumulative, relational and psychologically mediated harms into fair criminal liability. The overall contribution is a conceptual framework for analysing recognition, liability construction, institutional sorting and penal misalignment without reducing the debate to a choice between under-criminalisation and overcriminalisation. The manuscript is a preprint and has not undergone peer review.