The seductions of cybercrime: Adolescence and the thrills of digital transgression
| Author | David S. Wall,Andrew Goldsmith |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370819887305 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370819887305
European Journal of Criminology
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370819887305
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The seductions of cybercrime:
Adolescence and the thrills of
digital transgression
Andrew Goldsmith
Flinders University, Australia
David S. Wall
University of Leeds, UK
Abstract
This article offers a socio-technical framework for better understanding youthful attraction to,
and engagement in, online transgressions and delinquencies. Specifically, it takes the concept of
‘seduction’ from the work of Katz, as well as ‘affordance theory’ and insights from software and
human–computer interaction studies, to analyse the affordances of the Internet that tempt and
invite youthful transgressions such as digital piracy, viewing illegal pornography and hacking. We
argue that Internet affordances not only enable transgressions to occur but can also precipitate
them. The implications for youth crime policy are briefly addressed. Policy needs to reckon with
the power of these factors in adolescent lives and thus minimize reliance on punitive responses.
The article also contributes to the development of the concept of digital drift, by showing how
Internet features and affordances foster drift into cyber delinquency.
Keywords
Affordance, cybercrime, digital drift, Katz, seduction
Introduction
The public Internet has been with us for just 25 years (Castells, 2001). Yet, in this time, it
has intrigued, engaged and seduced more than half the planet’s population. It is estimated
that almost 4.5 billion people are Internet users as at 30 June 2019 (Internet World Stats,
2019). Young people (under the age of 30) are more likely than older persons to have
Corresponding author:
Andrew Goldsmith, Centre for Crime Policy and Research, College of Business, Government and Law,
Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia.
Email: andrew.goldsmith@flinders.edu.au
887305EUC0010.1177/1477370819887305European Journal of CriminologyGoldsmith and Wall
research-article2019
Article
2022, Vol. 19(1) 98–117
access to and to spend extended time on the Internet, conducting searches, playing games
and using social media (Eurostat, 2017). Its empowering possibilities have been much
commented upon, just as its attractions for entertainment, leisure and distraction have also
become more apparent and commercially valuable. Given its relative novelty and gener-
ally positive global reception, it is perhaps not surprising that some of its downsides have
only recently started to emerge in the public arena (for example, Keen, 2012; McNamee,
2019; Zittrain, 2008) and to receive scholarly analysis. The profound salience of the
Internet in the lives of many children and adolescents has triggered concern about cyber
safety, such as its use by adults to exploit children and by some children to bully other
children, as well as the detrimental effects on youth wellbeing from extended participation
in online gaming and social media (Valkenburg and Pietrowski, 2017).
In this article, rather than looking at young people as victims of crime or as problem-
atic Internet users (see Valkenburg and Pietrowski, 2017), we shall explore the Internet’s
significance in terms of turning adolescents, those from 12 to 19 years of age, towards
offending. The commission of cyber-related crimes by ‘normal’ youth, we propose, is
‘easy to do’ and ‘almost accidental’ (Goldsmith and Brewer, 2015; Matza, 1964). ‘Digital
drift’ (Goldsmith and Brewer, 2015), we shall argue, needs to be understood partly in
terms of the features and affordances (‘possibilities for action’) of the Internet that
amount to persuasive technologies that can make a variety of user applications ‘irresist-
ible’ (Alter, 2017; Schull, 2012). Such conditions, we shall argue, make drift more pow-
erful, sustained and difficult to reverse. In this article, we are specifically interested in the
elements (features, affordances) of the Internet that render it a ‘seductive swamp’
(Vaidhyanathan, 2011), especially for adolescents, enabling and provoking transgres-
sions and what have been called ‘cyborg crimes’ (Van der Wagen and Pieters, 2015) –
crimes produced through the combination of human and computer agency. The agency
of the latter, however, is often not visible or predictable, exhibiting what can be called a
‘technological unconscious’ (Wood, 2018: 79). Consequently, in interactions between
individuals and these platforms, human foresight of outcomes is limited by the unpre-
dictable composition, structure and operation of the Internet’s architecture (Van der
Wagen and Pieters, 2015: 592–3).
A second aim of this article is to consider the implications of this adolescent ‘digital
drift’ for the development of sound policy. Given the heavy engagement among young
people with various Internet platforms (social media, gaming, web searches), we need to
do more than sharpen our awareness of the criminogenic implications of this ‘swamp’.
This awareness also needs to inform the development of appropriate regulatory responses
that better target the drivers of these behaviours and that limit the punitiveness often seen
in such cases (Long and Hopkins Burke, 2015; Wall, 2017). For example, hackers are
found to be disproportionately very young and male (Hutchings and Chua, 2016). This
aspect of ‘youth’ causes very practical problems for law in terms of prosecution and
prevention that will be outlined later (Wall, 2017; Yar, 2005). Such concern is also found
in other transgressive areas such as the use of pornographic imagery; see, for example,
Quadara et al. (2017), who found that exposure to it can shape unsafe sexual practices
and progressively strengthen attitudes that are supportive of violence.
In developing our position in relation to youth seduction and the Internet, we will
draw upon Jack Katz’s (1988) work on youth shoplifters and graffiti artists because it
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