The reform of the Crime Survey of England and Wales (a national victim survey) has exposed a very high number of individuals who fall victim to computer misuse cybercrimes such as hacking, computer viruses and ransomware. These crimes receive very little attention from the criminal justice system and very few are brought to justice, partly because of the nature of them (global crimes), but also because of a lack of capability among the police. This paper draws on official statistics, an empirical survey and interview research with computer misuse victims. The paper juxtaposes the low priority and lack of resources given to this crime by political and police leaders against many victims’ perceptions and experiences of the crime as equivalent if not more serious than physical counterparts such as burglary, where there is greater interest. The increasing prominence of the virtual world in human life and the impacts of these crimes call for a reappraisal of the official assessment of seriousness in order to raise the priority and increase the capacity of criminal justice towards such offences.
Do men and women perceive cybercrime types differently? This article draws on the distinction between socio-economic and psychosocial cybercrime proposed by Lazarus (2019) to investigate whether men and women hold different perceptions of digital crimes across these two dimensions. Informed by the synergy between feminist theory and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF), our survey examined respondents' differential perceptions of socio-economic cybercrime (online fraud) and psychosocial cybercrime (cyberbullying, revenge porn, cyberstalking, online harassment) among men and women in the United Kingdom. The results revealed that women considered psychosocial cybercrime worse than men. Conversely, we found no differences between men and women with regard to socio-economic cybercrime. The article concludes that psychosocial cybercrimes are more gendered than socio-economic cybercrime, suggesting problems with the meaning of 'cyber-enabled crimes', and substantiating the synergy between the TCF and feminist perspectives.
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