Digital Trust & Security Seminar Series: Steve van de Weijer
The life-course and offending trajectories of cybercrime offenders
Date & Time: Wednesday 28th September 2022, 1300 - 1400 (UK). Online seminar with Q&A and discussion.
Summary: In our increasingly digitised society, new opportunities have emerged for offenders to commit cybercrimes. Official statistics and victimisation surveys show that victimisation rates of various types of cybercrimes rapidly increased during this century and these offences are now among the most prevalent types of crime in Western countries.
These developments have raised important questions for criminologists, some of which remain unanswered despite the profound debate. Should we consider cybercrime as a new type of crime or as ‘old wine in new bottles’? Are existing criminological theories, and findings on the causes, correlates, and consequences of traditional crimes, generalisable to cybercrime, or do we need new theories for this new type of crime?
In his presentation, Steve van de Weijer will focus on these questions and presents his research on correlates, consequences, and longitudinal patterns of cybercrime offending. First, studies will be discussed in which official register data from Statistics Netherland was used to examine differences in the intellectual capabilities and the criminal behavior of family members of cybercriminals, traditional criminals, and non-offenders. Second, the results of a field experiment will be presented in which the labour market opportunities of convicted cybercrime offenders were examined. Third, research on the heterogeneity in offending patters of hackers, using millions of self-reported web defacements, will be discussed.
Steve van de Weijer is a senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement. His research interests include the intergenerational continuity of crime, the life-course and criminal careers of offenders, biosocial criminology, crime reporting behaviors, and the causes and consequences of cybercrime offending and victimization.
