Digital media ‘changes the game’: investigating digital affordances impacts on sex crime and policing in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

With society becoming increasingly digital, new opportunities are afforded to potential offenders to weaponize digital features and affordances to carry out their crimes. As a result, concerns persist over online forms of crime, particularly cybercrime involving sexual exploitation, and what can be done about them. Drawing on interview and focus group data collected from 70 sex crime investigators from police service organizations across Canada, we uncover police perspectives on online sex-based crime. We demonstrate that police perceive online crimes to not necessarily be new forms of crime, but rather altered by digital media in terms of methods and weapons being used. We focus on uncovering the features and affordances police identify as contributing to the increase in crime itself as well as the creation of greater opportunities for crime to occur. In addition, resulting from crime shifting into digital spaces, we uncover the challenges digital media has presented for police in terms of how they handle, respond to, and investigate online crime. We discuss these challenges and their impact on policing and provide solutions for combatting them moving forward. Overall, this article contributes to the current body of literature investigating online crime and policing in the digital age by drawing on the theoretical framework of affordances and offering police perspectives on online sex-based crimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex crimes
• online crime
• digital media
• policing
• online affordances

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Arguably, this is even more prominent given the increased amount of time people are spending online during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Fitzpatrick, 2020).

2 Sexual exploitation investigation units were initially reactive; a majority of cases responded to complaints from the public (Fortin & Paquette, 2018; see Newburn, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Western University.

Notes on contributors

Dale Ballucci

Dale Ballucci is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western University in the Faculty of Social Science. Her publications primarily examine the administration of criminal justice practices and policies specifically, in the area of high-risk offender management, youth justice, and various forms of sexual violence.

Molly-Gloria Patel

Molly-Gloria Patel holds a position at Okanagan College. Harper's work focuses on cyberbullying, social media, youth and youth culture, deviance, and criminology.