Situational Precipitators of Crime on Cyberspace: An Introduction Related to Cyberhate Speech

• In Event: Technology and Crime: A Routine Activities Perspective on Cyber and Online Criminal Behavior

Abstract

The perspective of Situational Precipitators of Crime (SPC) developed by Wortley as a complement to the Theory of Rational Choice reflects how the environment can encourage or induce the person to commit crimes. Thus, the SPC are those psychological aspects of the interaction of the person with their environment that give rise to the beginning of criminal behavior.
On the basis of this theory, the aim of the study was to analyze the role of SPC, adapted to cyberspace (Prompts, Pressures, Permissibility and Provocations), on each one of the established categories of violent communication on the Internet.
For this purpose, an ad-hoc survey was designed to evaluate the variables of our study: sociodemographic information, self-reported behavior and SPC that could lead to different types of violent communication addressed in the study. The survey was administered online to a national representative sample of 1502 Internet users. The logistic regression models built show wich kind of precipitators are the best predictors of each type of violent communication on the Internet, information to take into account in the development of public policies to prevent this phenomena.

Authors

• Teresa Díez Ros, Miguel Hernández University

• Rebeca Bautista Ortuño, Miguel Hernández University

• Fernando Miró Llinares, CRIMINA Research Center for the Study and Prevention of Crime (Miguel Hernández University)