Bye Bye to the Cybercrime Pie: The Day the Research Died?

• In Event: Critical Criminology and Cybercrime

Abstract

During the last 30 years we have witnessed a unique development within criminology – the apparent emergence of a wholly new offending paradigm, together with all the paraphernalia of new research tools and practices aimed at making sense of it. The cybercrime phenomenon has generated a rich plethora of research grants and research outputs over this period but is it now time to stand back and to reflect more critically upon where we are? As the kinds of data driven approaches which appeal to police, policy makers and cybersecurity practitioners have come to dominate thinking in the field, is there a possibility that criminological approaches to cybercrime will become irrelevant, sending the funding pots elsewhere? In this paper I discuss how we arrived at this point, where new developments in cybercriminality may be leading and what can be done to maintain the authority of a distinctively criminological understanding of digital offending.

Author

• Michael R. McGuire, University of Surrey