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Who are the Victims? A Study on the Cybercrime Victimhood Construction

Sat, September 14, 9:30 to 10:45am, Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest, Floor: Ground floor, Amphitheater 4 „Vintilă Dongoroz”

Abstract

A critical argument against traditional positivist victimology is that victimization goes beyond the scope of criminal law. Thus, interactionist approach argues that victims are those who perceive themselves as such based on their personal interpretation, even if they have not suffered any material harm. So, the image of the victim is socially constructed through reporting the experience of victimization in each communicative act. However, existing research has typically used this approach within a qualitative paradigm, it would also be beneficial in quantitative research, for example, to study cybercrime, the number of which is growing. The feature of cybercrimes is that they are often not completed, because the success of the crime depends on whether the potential victim cooperates. However, regardless of whether the crime was completed, the criminal’s target can position themselves as a victim. Therefore we posed a question: what characteristics of offenders' targets determine whether they will report being a victim when they have not suffered harm. The empirical basis of the study is Russian Crime Victimization Survey (2021). Using regressions and text mining, we analyzed the narratives in which the respondents described the last victimization they faced, and identified 4 types of cybercrimes (both finished and unfinished): phone fraud, Internet fraud, illegal use of personal data, online theft. The result of this comparative study is revealing differences between victims of unfinished and finished cybercrimes of each type in terms of their socio-demographic characteristics and the peculiarities of their victimization experience.

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