Juvenile social cybercriminality: the hidden crime rate
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Cyberspace constitutes a basic context of socialization for digital natives, while, at the same time, representing a platform of criminal opportunity in which children and young people continue to be victims and perpetrators. Phenomena such as cyberbullying, online grooming and sexting constitute types of social cybercrime that involve a significant number of children in Spain each year. However, the high levels of prevalence revealed by research into self-reported cyber-victimization and cybercrime do not agree with the minor impact of juvenile cybercrime in the official statistics and the law courts. According to official data, there has been a growing trend in cybercrime in recent years, but it accounts for less than 2% of all recorded crimes. The data available on the involvement of children in these vases are extremely fragmented, claiming that only 4.5% of all recorded cyber-victimizations and 7.1% of all arrests and indictments for cybercrimes affect children.
The potential explanations of this discrepancy include the failure of victims to report cybercrime, a lack of evidence for prosecution and clarification of the facts, and the technical difficulties involved in proving the cybernetic component when reporting the offence. The high hidden crime rate in terms of juvenile social cybercrime contributes to the invisibility of the phenomenon, which reinforces the sense of impunity for perpetrators and the lack of protection and defencelessness of cyber-victims, which may even be considered as a kind of secondary victimization.
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