Cybercrime and Digital Criminology: Lecture 7

Overview

FORMS OF CYBERBULLYING

Li (2007) identifies seven different forms of cyberbullying:

1. Flaming

2. Online harassment

3. Cyberstalking

4. Denigration

5. Masquerading

6. Outing (doxing)

7. Exclusion

HOW PREVALENT IS ONLINE ABUSE?

• Prevalence studies vary quite considerably in their estimates of cyberbullying (Brochado et al 2017).

• USA = 25% of female and 11% of male middle-school students sampled had been cyber-bullied (Beale & Hall, 2007).

• Individuals victimised by cyber-bullying are frequently targeted concurrently by offline forms of bullying (Raskauskas & Stoltz 2007; Smith et al 2008).

• Qualitative research suggests that victims of cyber-bullying may suffer higher feelings of fear and helplessness than victims of traditional bullying (Perren et al. 2010; Spears et al. 2009).

• Victims of cyberbulling have considerably higher suicidal ideations than members of the general population (Schenk and Fremouw, 2012).

DOES THE DISCOURSE MEDIUM MATTER?

Biber et al. (2002) = do people make similar judgements of harassment in ‘online’ environments compared to more traditional academic or organizational settings?

• Behaviours such as making misogynistic remarks and using demeaning nicknames, for example, were perceived by participants in their study as more harassing online than offline.

• There may be comparatively little context to online remarks.

• The act of writing down misogynistic or hurtful comments, Biber et al. (2002) argue, implies that they have given thought to the comment.

REPORTING ONLINE BULLYING AND HARASSMENT

• Only 31 percent of the students surveyed who had been cyberbullied reported it to a teacher (Catalano, 2012).

• Young people tend to only report online abuse if they view it as serious (Holtfeld and Grabe, 2012).

• Victims often don't report online abuse to the police as they don't believe they will take it seriously (Nobles et al. 2012).

CRIMINALIZING ONLINE ABUSE

• Crimes Amendment (Bullying) Bill 2011 (‘Brodie’s Law’)

"In any other way that could reasonably be expected: (i) to cause physical or mental harm to the victim, including self-harm or (ii) to arouse apprehension or fear in the victim for his or her own safety or that of any other person” (Crimes Act 1958 s21A)

• Individuals found guilty of bullying offences may be face a penalty of a maximum of 10 years imprisonment (Crimes Act 1958, s21A)

IDENTITY AND ONLINE ABUSE

• Canadian Uniform Crime Reporting Survey = 70% of victims who reported online harassment or intimidation were female (Perreault, 2013).

• Henry and Powell (2015b) emphasise the embodied nature of violence on social media.

• What is considered offensive on the internet is notoriously contested, and the line between harassment and disagreement often blurred (Nussbaum, 2010).

GAMERGATE AND TECHNOLOGY

• Salter (2017: 3) = the masculinisation of technology has ‘invited intense emotional and psychological identifications from men’, and led to men claiming technological knowledge as the basis for a masculine identity (Murray 1993).

• When women are seen to intrude on this supposedly masculine space, they are met with toxic campaigns of abuse, harassment and violence (Salter 2017).

• As several scholars note (Henry & Powell 2015b; Jane 2016; Salter 2017), there is an important congruence between misogynist practices and the technosocial arrangements which facilitate them.

• Platform politics: ‘the assemblage of design, policies, and norms that encourage certain kinds of cultures and behaviors to coalesce on platforms while implicitly discouraging others’ (Massanari 2017: 336).

GAMERGATE AND AFFECT

• The #gamergate controversy refers to the concerted campaign of online abuse directed first at game designers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and feminist media blogger Anita Sarkeesian, then later at a range of female game designers, reporters and speakers (Bate 2017).

• Ahmed (2004b: 57) argues that certain bodies are attributed as being hateful such that the origins of hate are ‘sealed in their skins’.

• In the case of #gamergate, the technosocial bodies of the women involved came to embody the ‘impossible and phobic’ (Ahmed 2004b: 54) that threaten to disrupt the carefully masculinised world of technology.

INTRODUCTION

Crime prevention = “The total of all private initiatives and state policies, other than the enforcement of criminal law, aimed at the reduction of damage caused by acts defined as criminal by the state” (Van Dijk & de Waard 1991: 483).

Crime prevention is “not just a theoretical proposition but also a corpus of preventative practices” (Hope and Sparks, 2000: 177).

THE LIMITS OF CRIMINALIZATION

• Recent work has problematised the ability of the law to respond to the constantly changing dynamics of social media (Henry and Powell 2015a; Jane 2016; Salter 2016).

• Though most hate speech researchers acknowledge that the law has some utility in preventing the harms, the majority argue that legal mechanisms by themselves are not an effective way of responding to hate speech.

• A number of researchers (Salter 2016; Stratton, Powell & Cameron 2017) have highlighted the role of technological rationality (Marcuse 2013), or the way in which the design of technology influences the behaviour of its users, preventing harms associated with social media.

CRIME PREVENTION THEORY

• Environmental prevention focuses “on the settings for crime, rather than those committing criminal acts” (Clarke 1997: 1).

• Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) mobilises techniques including natural surveillance and territorial reinforcement to discourage offending within an area (see Cozens, Saville and Hillier 2005; Jacobs 1961; Newman 1972).

• Subsuming and expanding upon the aims and methods of CPTED, Situational Crime Prevention attempts to make crime a more difficult and less rewarding enterprise to accomplish within an area or against a particular target (Clarke 1997; 1998).

• Situational Crime Prevention endeavors to remove opportunities for individuals to offend (Sutton et al. 2008).

NATURAL SURVEILLANCE

• Natural surveillance follows the rationale that an individual is less likely to offend if they know there is a high likelihood that their illegal act will be seen and subsequently reported (Clarke 1997).

• As users may report abusive messages, material, and site users to moderators individuals may be deterred from victimising others in online environments where their actions may be monitored and reported (see Facebook 2012; Youtube 2012).

• Limitations:

• As online abuse often occur in highly ‘populated’ cyber-environments, the risk of being reported has little deterrent effect upon many offenders.

• Certain cyber-environments may not, owing to their architecture, facilitate natural surveillance.

TERRITORIAL REINFORCEMENT, TARGET REMOVAL AND ACCESS CONTROL

• Territorial reinforcement is closely relates to Oscar Newman’s (1972) notion of defensible space: “the reassignment of physical areas and areas of responsibility” to property owners to promote sentiments of ownership, pride and control over the land (Newman 1996: 3).

• Territorial reinforcement = the enactment of physical and symbolic barriers to denote easily recognisable boundaries between public and private space (Sutton et al. 2008).

• Access control = entailing a continuum of measures that range from discouraging individuals from entering a precinct or property to the outright exclusion of individuals from an area (von Hirsch & Shearing 2000).

THE LIMITATIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION

• Do not address the underlying causes of offending.

• Displacement: the notion that whilst situational CP may stop offending from occurring in a particular spatial environment, offenders may merely move their criminal activities to areas that are not under the auspices of environmental protective measures (Laycock & Tilley 1995).

• Unable to prevent expressive crimes? (Hayward 2007; 2012).

SOCIAL CRIME PREVENTION

• Institutional, familial, and community-centred initiatives that “reduce the likelihood that individuals or groups will include crime in their repertoire of behaviours” (Sutton et al. 2008: 22).

• Brantingham and Faust’s (1976) = primary, secondary, and tertiary crime prevention

• Primary prevention: aims to broadly modify criminogenic physical and social environments. Targets everyone.

• Secondary prevention: intervene in the lives of those most likely to offend in the future.

• Tertiary prevention: seeks to prevent recidivism.

EDUCATIONAL PREVENTION CAMPAIGNS

• Victorian Take a Stand Against Bullying Campaign (DOJ 2012), and Federal Bullying. No Way! (2012) and National Safe Schools Framework (DEEWR 2012) initiatives.

• Within crime prevention literature, educational campaigns are understood as a distinct class of social prevention (Cherney & Sutton 2002).

• Limitations:

• Campaigns are often expensive.

• May not reach or have a transformative effect on the marginalised populations they often attempt to target (Cherney & Sutton 2002).

DEVELOPMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION

• Developmental crime prevention initiatives attempt to bestow families, schools and community organizations with the requisite resources to diminish risk factors associated with offending (Homel 2005).

• Early risk factors for future offending:

• Inadequate child rearing behaviour (Farrington 1979)

• Poverty (Weatherburn & Lind 1998; Shader 2004)

• Low parental supervision of a child’s activities (Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber 1986; Farrington 1992)

• Examples: parental training programs (see Farrington 1994) and educational and economic support for disadvantaged children.

• Often not framed primarily as crime prevention initiatives: crime reduction exists as a by-product of broader social, educational, and developmental initiatives (Sutton et al. 2008).

DEVELOPMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION

• Evidence indicates that anti-bullying programs in schools are more effective at reducing bullying among younger students (Rigby 2002).

• Preventative measures that are not explicitly articulated as social crime prevention benefit from not labelling their participants as deviant or at risk – a factor that can potentially increase the probability of participants offending (see McCord 2003).

• Limitations:

• Effect change in the long term, and as such, represent an unattractive enterprise for governments facing four-year election cycle.

• Effective but not affective crime prevention (Freiberg, 2001).

NEXT WEEK:

Online informal justice

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